No, it wouldn’t. In fact, the Steem blockchain would be a worse place without flagging because it would become an eden for plagiarizers, copyright infringements, and imposters banking on the goodwill and welcoming nature of the Steem nature.

A while ago payouts were received after only 1 day rather than the 7 days we know now. That was changed because upvoters often didn’t have the opportunity to timely remove their upvote when an imposter was caught or didn’t confirm their identity and was thus wrongly upvoted.

While whales can downvote other Steemians and even dent their reputation, Steemians should learn that a vote (up- or downvote) is a systemwide free vote. Nothing else. That the upvote may contain rewards is only defined by the price feed but is definitely not a right.

Once understood that upvotes are merely that, a systemwide thumbs up or down, people may hopefully look differently at flags. While flags can “hide” content from sites, that is all they do. The content is still on the blockchain and the blockchain itself is immutable. Thus there is no oppression of free expression when content it flagged. IT is merely a disagreement with the rewards. Whether that disagreement is because of content, content quality, or personal feuds is irrelevant for the blockchain. The blockchain doesn’t hide any content, even not flagged content.

Just like we are free to upvote, everyone is free to flag any post or comment on the Steem blockchain.

Without measures like flags Steem would be the Wild Wild West for copyright infringers. A horrible place to be, a place milked even more by abusers. A place where even @steemcleaners wouldn’t be able to act and where phishing fighters like @arcange couldn’t nuke a confirmed phishing account into oblivion..