Since our speech here on Hive is the source of rewards, and everyone needs must express an opinion to speak, what you are claiming is that censoring opinions you do not agree with is what flags are for, and that is utterly contrary to any conception of rational debate, discussion, or discovery, and free speech itself.
Dial it back, or simply slap an armband on and demand plebs march in goosestep to your personal notions of what is acceptable to believe.
It is not the opinion regarding an issue that determines one's right to speak it, but how that opinion is expressed. Is it well researched? Is it well written? Is it spammed in every blog in comments? Is it used to trick people into parting with their stake? A preference for the color red is not an acceptable reason to flag, while expressing that opinion in various ways can be.
I may choose to communicate my preference for the color red by using a knife to turn people red with their own blood, and that is not a mode of expression any just legal theory would say I have a right to undertake, regardless of my opinion of the color. There are reasonable limits on our right to expression, and flagging well researched and written posts to zero exceeds those reasonable limits, regardless of the opinions involved.
In fact, so censoring certain speech might as well be stabbing people to death, because security and safety signals are absolutely dependent on free speech to promulgate. Free speech is of existential import. People die of the lack of it far more than of the lack of money, IMHO.
The worse censorship grows elsewhere, the less Hive should be censored, and the more valuable censorship resistance becomes.
Excuse me? Except for posts involving downvote drama and other insider nonsense that has no or negative marketing value (but still perfectly legitimate to debate, just don't expect to be paid for it), I only ever downvote moderately, such that there is still a very significant reward. If you think that getting a payout of, for example, $100 instead of $120 for something that in most cases couldn't earn a penny anywhere else is censorship, I don't know what to tell you. I can't speak for others' downvoting, take it up with them.