I mostly agree with your comments here, with the exception that flagging isn't just something that front ends show. Downvotes, which I refer to as flags, are financial impacts. The front ends translate the blockchain data, but the downvotes are blockchain data. I am sure we will agree that financial mechanisms are very often used to censor people, as noted in earlier comments. In addition to direct financial impact, reputation is also impacted, and this is where the front ends most differ in the impact of downvotes.
I appreciate very deeply that we can have this conversation on Hive. Can you imagine having such a discussion on Twatter or Fakebook? Hive is censorship resistant because it uses downvotes to censor spam, scams, and plagiarism while enabling the community to counter flags and out-support content that has been financially attacked by downvotes.
That's why I'm here and not on Twatter or elsewhere. Enabling financial attacks to be used by the community to prevent spam is a good thing. Financial attacks on dissenting opinions by overlords is a very bad thing, and anyone with an opinion that isn't handed to them by overlords should be very averse to it. The Hive community has some ability to support those who are censored, but this often requires supporting speech one doesn't particularly agree with, and that isn't something most of us do often, or well.
People that support censoring those whose speech they disagree with end up being censored. When overlords censor their hapless subjects, it is always to conceal safety data, danger signals, and the like. Censorship of opinion is an existential threat that is always carried out. You can see - or could have watched as it happened - many people who supported censoring 'conspiracy theorists' suddenly changing their minds when harm came to them or their loved ones from the conspiracy in question, and then disappearing from the conversation when they were censored, just as they'd once advocated, by the conspirators.
Losing our tokens from a post isn't the existential harm losing our lives in a pogrom is, so it's easy to dismiss the issue on Hive, because Hive isn't most people's sole source of danger signals. Such dismissal just deprecates Hive, and keeps it from becoming that essential communications platform where people in danger can get information that keeps them alive in a dangerous world.
Hive has potential to be far more than Twatter. I think that potential has been flagged away for years, and I'd really like to see Hive attain it's potential, because I'd really like people to actually govern their communities on actual dirt, voluntarily contributing funds, forthrightly discussing policy, and etc, without the potential for overlords to control them by buying control of the dialogue. Centralized platforms make that control facile. Hive should make it much harder than we have yet. Insofar as profiteering is the problem, I address the problem as I get around to it.
We can do that on Hive, but not so much anywhere else.
The thing is that this is a user-owned platform. If rarely but sometimes do flag content that I find really disagreeable. To the extent I have influence here, this is my platform. No one is entitled to any rewards here whatsoever. It is the token holders who control the rewards and they have the right to use their influence to rewards the sort of content they want. Period. It is always possible to buy Hive Power from the free market.
I think the problem of rewards and reputation is to a large part due to the early stage we're in. As time passes, it becomes easier for communities deviating from mainstream opinion to be set up and thrive also in financial terms through second-layer tokenization. Reputation is also one of the parameters front ends are completely free to ignore and replace with one of their own.