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Many see the problem right now as not enough downvotes. It costs people voting power they could use to gain curation rewards. Instead they get flag wars. There are many posts about scammers taking from the rewards pool without providing any value, so making it harder for downvotes to happen would only make that problem worse.

Every proposed solution has unintended consequences which should be considered in great detail. Some are thinking about a possible flag rewards pool or even a separate bank of voting power for downvotes to prevent abuse. It's some tricky stuff and may not be figured out until we have SMTs to play with different approaches.

Turns out I still don't know enough about Steem.

You are welcome to comment here Luke, your comments are additional knowledge for me.

I agree, @lukestokes, any new solution to flagging may have unexpected consequences. I guess the topic of downvotes often gets debated on steemit (I have seen quite a few).

Right now I am doing my own thing with downvotes - mainly for spam commenting, more rarely for plagiarism.

My preferred approach is warning first. Then if the spammer does not heed it, I use a small 10% flag to get his attention, with a promise to remove the flag if he learned the lesson. 10% can go to 20% - and so on if the behaviour does not improve.

On a bad-day, I am not beyond giving an immediate 10% or 20% flag for the most blatant cases of spam (with an explanation of course).

It rarely happens that someone flags me back. Mostly I get apologies, and then I remove the small flag. Even if they flag me back, I tend not to bother with retaliation. My high steempower means they can’t harm me. I just try to focus on changing their bad habits.

Sometimes I realise I am dealing with robots. (Robots can post plagiarised internet articles, changing just enough words to fool @originalcontent and similar plagiarism detection bots). There’s not a lot of point in giving warnings to robots.