Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter @denmarkguy!
Yeah, I think that most people wouldn't fault you for flagging spam, or plagiarism. I would consider those one word comments a form of spam too. I just wish the devs would ditch the flagging tool all together or make it explicitly for spam/plagiarism/and the like. The way the up-voting and down-voting works though it's so weird.
60 people could vote so that some guy gets 10.00 in rewards, and then 1 guy if he's got enough Steem could be like nope, not happening, the whole thing seems illogical. It would be like if there was an election and 5 different people were running for an office. They count the number of votes and politician (a) wins with the highest votes, but then politician (b) who has more money says nope, and completely erases the efforts of the previous voters.
It's almost divisive in it's very nature. I think that Steemit should consider um, keeping the flag tool for spam, but removing the weight of the vote so that people focus more on who they want to reward vs. whose rewards they want to take away. It would probably allow for people in the steemit community to focus more energy on creativity, than they do on infighting, reward pool policing, and down vote wars.
I don't see a downside to that idea, is there some kind of downside I might be missing with that? I think @binkyprod's idea about removing vote weight from down votes could potentially be very beneficial.