I am a flag virgin, haven't raised the first one because I believe in words. The distribution of rewards is achieved by voting, not flagging.
I believe flagging should be a paid feature because if you are willing to hide someone's content instead of telling them what bothers you about it, then you should invest some of your own strenght in weakening them. If you just don't like the fact that they are making so much with their content, then you make better content to cash in their place and don't vote for them.
This is the problem. You don't realise that your flag is your vote.
You probably weren't here back in May, but back then there was no flag. There were 2 buttons next to eachother - an upvote and a downvote.
When you voted you were deciding whether a post deserved more or less rewards. Unfortunately at the time, the whales had no way to scale their vote, so when they wanted to downvote something they had to downvote at 100% which made the post invisible.
People got all stuck up about the downvoting of whales and to discourage that behaviour it was turned to a flag. But it serves the exact same function as before, only the image and perception have dramatically changed. Now people see the downvote as an attack.
Now that we have the vote scale I believe down-voting should be seen the same as upvoting. It should be valued as an important part of the system.
The system doesn't work if we don't use it. If people are afraid to use their vote because they don't believe in the power of their vote, then the markets are NOT deciding like everybody says they are.
When I flag someone I am not giving an opposite vote worth the negative of my upvote, I am not taking their existing rewards, I am only hiding their content so that others have a harder time voting or commenting on it, finding it, and giving them more rewards. My flag doesn't tell the author why this is happening either. The flag prevents voting by limiting exposure, it doesn't counter existing votes.
If I am going to limit someone's exposure I think it's very important they know why, otherwise it can be perceived as an attack. If someone doesn't want to use words then they should have to pay to limit themselves in order to limit others. Why can't flags have a price and whatever is collected goes back to the distribution?
Actually that is exactly what it does. If you look on steemd.com under advanced view voting details you can see the weight for such downvotes/flags as being the negative of what your positive weight otherwise would be. These are added up to get the net rshares for the post.
Thanks for the info!
That's completely untrue. You are in fact lowering the rewards making the exact opposite of an upvote and unless you vote the post to $0.00, you are not hiding the post so that others can't find it.
It absolutely does.
So leave a comment explaining why.
They do have a price. An upvote gives a curation reward. A downvote gives no reward. You only have so many votes before your curation rewards become diluted. Therefore the downvote is the cost of an upvote which pays you. Also, if you don't get the curation reward, then it is distributed to everyone else.
I didn't know this
@beanz description of what the flagging mechanism is intended for:
Flagging description, when you click on the flag button, here on Steemit:
According to Steemit's description, you're wrong. That description says nothing about content quality or even vote-buying. It "flags" dishonesty and vileness.
You vote with your upvotes and you essentially downvote by passing on voting-up a post. Hence, the community, at large, decides what content is worth and people whom misuse flags rightfully get punished for their ignorance/ malice.
Intentional or not, you're spreading misinformation and people that start to implement your suggestion(s) about how to properly use the flag are likely to suffer from doing so, unless they happen to be a whale...I think everyone realizes by now that they're essentially untouchable.