The problem I have with the incentivized flags is that rather than be used to crowd-source for quality etc, they will become ridiculous vendetta tools. Can't really claim that the average maturity of the platform is high as if it was, a lot of the problems wouldn't exist in the first place.
I agree that the reward system should be as simple as possible, at least for the beginner stages as the current barriers to entry are already so high due to the complexity of the entire process. The complexity can still exist of course but the average user need not feel they have to worry about it at sign up unless thy are investing in.
I think that's all part of the crowdsourcing. If someone is using downvotes as an attack against otherwise valuable content, then the community can step in and upvote it. Often I've found that people who are the target of unfair downvoting can appeal to the community and come out ahead of where they started in terms of support and votes.
Also, i'm not necessarily saying that what i'm proposing will work, i don't think anyone knows that for sure. But my guess is that it would work better than adjusting numbers in some algorithm, and i think the experiment of the Steem platform as a whole is about crowdsourcing rewards more than algorithmic rewards, so I would like to give it a real shot.
It becomes a strategy to get upvotes as I think we have seen utilized enough.
Don't get me wrong, I am pretty open to experimentation here as long as there is the understanding that it is going to keep getting experimented on to find a point that is best for the community as a whole. No solution is ever going to be perfect so in my eyes, the experimentation doesn't end.
Flags aren't really incentivized in this proposal (we don't know of a good method to do that even if we wanted to), they just stop being so costly. You still earn essentially nothing by downvoting. Your other content does go up every so slightly slightly in payout all else being equal, but it is quite negligible (and your other content too can be downvoted if don't have sufficient merit)
Bad choice of words. Less-disincentivized. Don't get me wrong, I am in support of trying it as I would like to see how it plays out. I understand that people fear flags and that should change (my first flag was from you a very long time ago :D ) and I would hope that it would make people think twice or up their standards before boosting nonsense.
There is no point discussing forever something that can be trialed quite cheaply. Work or not, either way, we would have better knowledge going forward instead of only predictions.