I think a reasonable way to prevent this is to use the voters record to determine whether their vote should hide a post.
That is to say, lets say voter X has a record of flagging posts which eventually end up visible (presumably because the community wants to see them and has voted accordingly)... this users downvote should count (like every vote should count) in the distribution or rewards, but should be ignored when the UI trys to figure out when to display posts.
If it turns out the user was right, then eventually others will see the bad post flag it, and it will disappear. If it turns out the user was wrong (as his history leads us to believe he will be) then he won't have been able to inflict the temporary harm of hiding a post that was otherwise worthy until others could come along and unhide it.
In addition to this, this would be a reasonable and workable deterrant to irresponsible flagging, which has perennially had everyones panties in a bunch. You could set up a system such that if XX pervcent of the posts someone flags end up visible by their 1 day payout, that users flag would no longer be able to hide a post or comment.
Just a spit ball idea, but IMO the number should probably be between 50 and 75%.
Just a thought.
Thank you for your response and for taking the time to think about solutions! I think your idea is a really positive way of looking at it and might help to curb the random down-voting, while also still keeping spammers off the site (many of my solutions might make spam easier).
Is there an official process for submitting ideas to the Steemit team?
If you're a programming type (which you seem to be from your other posts) i think your best bet might be on github. Im not entirely sure how that works though.