@stellabelle said this and I started replying when not viewing full context, went to respond and it told me I was at the 6 post limit. So I am posting it here.

I think we all finding out who we really are with this post. I am of the opinion that radical transparency is best. I feel that excessive policing of our thoughts and whales who try to threaten us when we express critical thought processes is a bad thing, perhaps even the main driver of steemit's downward spiral of late. Once people are afraid to speak up, then, we've lost it. The ones who seek to silence us from looking at hard data are sealing their own fate, I'm afraid.

I agree. I am a strong advocate and out spoken about the fact I think the flag should only be used for Plagiarism, Spam, and Abusive posts. I've held this stance for months. I do not endorse flags for disagreement. I consider that a hostile act. It is penalizing someone subjectively.

I do believe I need to extend this. If the investigative efforts have been proven to identify what is likely a sock puppet style account then there may be good reason to flag such posts. We need to discourage this. If it is endorsed by specific individuals then we need to withold our support for them if this is how they want to use steemit. Then at least their actions would be confined and only contributed to by themselves. These actors are powerful, so that still will put a big drain on the reward pool. I also believe this is something worth knowing about when we cast our votes for witnesses. I won't vote for people partaking in sock puppet activity or endorsing it as a legitimate undertaking.

I applaud the efforts of @ats-david, @bacchist, @klye, and others for investigating things like this. I know some of them have gone negative in some comment sections, but we are human, we are passionate. People are going to make mistakes. If they are mistakes of passion in a comment section let's cut them some slack. It is clear from their blog posts that their true intentions are to make steemit a better place and attract more people.

The flagging and undue effect of that from steem powerful is one of the main things that has kept around a half dozen people I tried to get to start using steemit to come here. They really don't like that ability and despite the fact that censorship does not exist due to it being on the blockchain, without the technical ability and wherewithal to get at those posts (Understeem) it is effectively censorship as far as they are concerned. We as a community can do things like this post and our support of people making these posts to make such activities unattractive, and unrewarding. It doesn't all require magic code. We as a community can make some things happen as well.

Thanks for your response @stellabelle.