RE: Time to start flagging the "trending" trash...
I have no problem whatsoever with negative opinions. The problem appears when you give everyone a gun and completely free license to use it in order to enforce their opinions.
Downvotes and flags should stay imo.. but they have to be defanged, deweaponized. Otherwise you achieve completely opposite effect from free exchange of opinions. Would you be as vocal with YOUR opinions if you knew that everyone knows where you live and if they chose to they can blow your brains out, with no liability whatsoever?
That's a great system for one thing only - total self censorship. Everyone posts only what is "safe" to everyone. In other words, inspirational quotes and pictures of cats. A social network which fosters this kind of community through its mechanics will not survive the upcoming realignment of the market.
Personally, I prefer systems which do not add up upvotes and downvotes but keep them separate. This creates a nice derived indicator of how "controversial" (in other words, interesting) a post is. In Steemit downvotes could be recorded, maybe even their steem value, but not deducted from the value of the post. Users could then filter to not see posts which have too many relative downvotes or are too controversial (difference between upvotes and downvotes). This would allow giving negative opinions through voting system without creating an ideal playground for actual cyber bullying. (No, I do not consider someone saying something nasty to me "bullying". But if someone directly and materially damages me just because he can then it is real, actual bullying. In their attempt to create a "self regulating" platform, steemit creators have actually constructed a bully's paradise, a place where I can BUY the power to take away your income and shut you up)
But all this is actually quite old discussion. Early MMOs went through exactly this phase almost 20 years ago with harsh death penalties in PvP and gear loss through death. They quite quickly realized where this is leading long term (hint: no, it's not prosperity and steady inflow of new players) and that's why almost no online games today feature this mechanic. As I said, under the hood all social networks are MMORPGs. Ignore the expensive lessons learned from decades of development and research in these games at your own peril.
I can't think of a more safe space than a place without those "weaponised" flags. Steem is a shared social space. We are social animals. Play the game, and be smart about it. If you really want to say something so much (hopefully it's not hate speech, because many supporting freedom of speech usually fail to understand the difference) - just say it? Of course in a place where it's a shared social space, you're guaranteed to have opinions flying in. I wouldn't run into a random village, taking a piss everywhere, spraying graffiti all over without expecting consequences? Plus, you said "everyone posts only what is safe to everyone". Who is everyone?Edit: had my points jumbled up, might come back to this later.
How is it materially damaging? Post payouts are not even paid out before it's finalised by the end of X days.
And then you mentioned about MMORPGs - don't they have items where people can buy to become more powerful and be utilised in part of a game? But okay, besides semantics and drawing parallels to MMORPGS , guns, cyberbullying, and censorship (which always gets twisted around here, because content actually stays on the chain regardless, and downvotes are not even exercised wholly by one single authority), flagging is just a tool for a decentralised community to self-regulate the supply distribution. Of course it can be abused like anything else.
But as a game enthusiast, you're actually proposing the total inability for community members to reduce potential payouts, leaving out an attack vector for exploits on so many levels. So what if flags are "defanged", giving everybody else ways to exploit the game up to "unlimited" earnings? With a community board just stating inconsequential opinions.. then what happens? It's not likely the relevant community members that are adding to the abuse/exploit gonna correct themselves - they're the ones doing it in the first place. This is will kill the entire system. Even worse is that it allows self-voted spam to go unchecked.
As for your perception that flags create a "cyberbullies paradise", consider these:-
Controversial does not mean interesting btw..
I've likened Steem as an MMORPG, but like everything else, even if we can reason out intelligibly that X = Y, doesn't mean that it's all 100% the same, like how you're trying reason out that what worked or didn't work for MMORPGs is entirely applicable to something like Steem. Not nearly the same thing.