I am fairly new to Steemit, wrote a few articles about gaming so far. Trying to get deeper in the community. I have seen some downvoting ect... and I can not completely agree with your point. I see tons of stolen pictures... non-stop spam comments... bad sourcing... the whole nine and I think that flagging and removing the monetary incentive to just copy paste and post for dollars everyday is a good way to thwart Steemit from being over run by bots and abusers.

Now sometimes I do see content flagged by some of the more wealthy Steemit holders for reasons that do not exactly fall into plagiarism, or spam... but rather just bad content or abusing the system. like making 6 to 10 posts a day with a picture and 4 sentences about a candle stick graph... no real content and then use bots and delegation to make 100s of dollars per post. I also agree with the people that flag these posts... the obvious abuse of the system and draining the reward pool.. I think this discourages people more the occasional flag.. it certainly does personally. I try to write in depth articles that I see get out performed everyday by a sentence and a meme..

I think flagging is necessary and most witnesses do a good job. (the ones I know) like @themarkymark awesome guy.