Flagging Posts based upon Differing Opinions
Some people have been complaining about users who down-vote posts they disagree with. The basis of the idea is that all posts are entitled to funding from those who support the ideas. This stance is in direct opposition to the vested interests of every stakeholder.
You've made the concept of downvoting complicated by changing the concept on the Steemit front end to flagging. Flagging as a concept on other websites is meant for clear cases of user content needing removal. On Steemit, newer users seeing a flag feel directly threatened that the perfectly ok post they've made has been selected as needing removal.
Their pre-existing concepts clash with existing concepts of other Steem users, especially those that have been around before a downvote was called a flag by Steemit. I participated in a discussion on this topic in this post: https://steemit.com/steemitabuse/@generalspecific/a-recourse-for-preventing-the-abuse-of-flagging-downvotes
Is there a better concept to put forward than flag for downvotes? The concept disparity between old and new, and between Steem and Steemit have caused issues.
The switch from downvoting to flagging in the UI was a mistake. It contradicts the notion of a platform where stakeholders decide on the fate of content as a consensus between people who may agree or disagree and turns it into one where a UI designer has imposed a non-neutral value system on what it means to downvote and when that should be used.
The reputation system has its own issues, but at least all the inputs to reputation are those that come from stakeholders (over time), not a UI designer. Even if, as is the case, the rules for aggregating this input are are somewhat arbitrary and broken.
Finally, hiding content based on voting and/or rep should be configurable by the end user. I may want to filter out all content that doesn't get enough upvotes (for example at least 1 MV worth). You may want to filter out content from anyone with less than a 70 rep. Someone else might want to see the whole fire hose. And finally someone may wish to see only that which has been approved by a specified set of voters (perhaps this could be used for "parental controls" with a trusted child-friendly approval service). There is no harm in providing this choice (other than the costs of implementing it of course).