That's a great system for one thing only - total self censorship. Everyone posts only what is "safe" to everyone.
I can't think of a more safe space than a place without those "weaponised" flags. Steem is a shared social space. We are social animals. Play the game, and be smart about it. If you really want to say something so much (hopefully it's not hate speech, because many supporting freedom of speech usually fail to understand the difference) - just say it? Of course in a place where it's a shared social space, you're guaranteed to have opinions flying in. I wouldn't run into a random village, taking a piss everywhere, spraying graffiti all over without expecting consequences? Plus, you said "everyone posts only what is safe to everyone". Who is everyone?
Edit: had my points jumbled up, might come back to this later.
This would allow giving negative opinions through voting system without creating an ideal playground for actual cyber bullying. (No, I do not consider someone saying something nasty to me "bullying". But if someone directly and materially damages me just because he can then it is real, actual bullying.
How is it materially damaging? Post payouts are not even paid out before it's finalised by the end of X days.
And then you mentioned about MMORPGs - don't they have items where people can buy to become more powerful and be utilised in part of a game? But okay, besides semantics and drawing parallels to MMORPGS , guns, cyberbullying, and censorship (which always gets twisted around here, because content actually stays on the chain regardless, and downvotes are not even exercised wholly by one single authority), flagging is just a tool for a decentralised community to self-regulate the supply distribution. Of course it can be abused like anything else.
But as a game enthusiast, you're actually proposing the total inability for community members to reduce potential payouts, leaving out an attack vector for exploits on so many levels. So what if flags are "defanged", giving everybody else ways to exploit the game up to "unlimited" earnings? With a community board just stating inconsequential opinions.. then what happens? It's not likely the relevant community members that are adding to the abuse/exploit gonna correct themselves - they're the ones doing it in the first place. This is will kill the entire system. Even worse is that it allows self-voted spam to go unchecked.
As for your perception that flags create a "cyberbullies paradise", consider these:-
- Power have to be bought into - this improves the value for everyone else.
- Downvotes are just as much a scarce resource as upvotes. Sometimes I even downvote comments that I don't want seen at the top of my posts, or anyone else's just to arrange the ranking. Is that cyberbullying? That's just perception.
This creates a nice derived indicator of how "controversial" (in other words, interesting)
Controversial does not mean interesting btw..
I've likened Steem as an MMORPG, but like everything else, even if we can reason out intelligibly that X = Y, doesn't mean that it's all 100% the same, like how you're trying reason out that what worked or didn't work for MMORPGs is entirely applicable to something like Steem. Not nearly the same thing.