Copyright for instance, is a legal grey area which puts the platform and its users at risk.
I disagree. why should your opinion be any more valuable than mine? Copyright infringement, like all forms of abuse, is only abuse per quod.
For example, in late july one poster had this to say about whether copyright infringement is abuse and should be downvoted:
You can define it as a problem or you can be realistic about it, but not both. There will be a million users (if we're lucky) sharing content, just as there have been on every single social media site in the the history of the Internet. That's what people do. It will need to be addressed by copyright holders making takedown requests when they object (which isn't always), just as it is on every other web property. link
Welcome to social media. People share interesting content they find online, some are good at doing so, and this creates value for followers. Sometimes content owners decide to assert rights and have the content taken down, but often they don't.
You are welcome to write as many 50 line comments against this concept of social media value creation by finding and sharing of content, and you may even be correct in a sense, but in terms of the bigger picture you are completely wrong. When millions of users come, if they do, they will be doing the same thing here they do everywhere to find, select, and share content, and you won't be able to bully them the way @masteryoda has been bullied. link
The problem is that the term "abuse" deceptively implies the existence of a set of objective standards. Normally, on platforms different from steem those objective standard are based upon compliance or noncompliance with the site TOS, but there is no TOS here. We make the rules by upvoting content we think is paid less than its value warrants and downvoting content that we think is paid more than its value warrants. We make our own rules and to do that, users need both an upvote and a downvote.
On a site like facebook or twitter a flag means that you broke an objective set of site policies about what content is acceptable. A downvote on steem can never mean that.
^^THIS is an excellent comment IMHO