Agreed...mostly.
Flaggin is wrong and needed to be removed from Steemd. I, personally, have seen a few 'noobs' run off by malicous flaggers. I provides no positive benifit not provided my mute.
'bots. Robot harvesters are a scourge. I'm sure you know that of all they 'votes' that you recieve, you only get a tiny percentage of 'views' to go with them. That not 'curation'. that's haravesting. It too ill serves the community as a whole.
Downvotes are necessary to fight abuse. While you can filter yourself by muting, that doesn't prevent the abuser from taking rewards out.
Also, there is no such thing as a "malicious flagger" (except if it's combined with an abuse of the reputation system). People have reasons that aren't necessarily obvious. A flag costs the flagger money too, she could have received curation rewards for upvoting something else instead.
Flaggin IS abuse, it prevents nothing other than free speech..
There most definitely are malicious flaggers...one calls himself the 'bad whale'. and does so out of spite. He just likes to hurt people.
I won't repeat what I wrote before, I explained why downvotes are necessary. Your claims are bullshit.
Bernie calling himself the "'OG' bad whale" is sarcasm, because dan called him like that once.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinon
No one is entitled to their own facts.
YOUR claims is bovine excretion. Flags are wrong.
Well, then argue. Just being against something is easy. Ever tried being constructive?
What's your suggestion on how to prevent rewards for spammers/plagiarizers/etc. if not by opposing upvotes?
what gives you the right to steal?
That accusation is so stupid, it's not worth to even think about how to reply.
Flagging (or downvoting) is a complicated subject which I've addressed before. I agree, some people see a flag, think they did something wrong, and don't come back.
As for bots, I have a lot of mixed feelings about that. I wrote a piece against unmonitored automatic voting (follow voting) and I've done some experiments with bot voting vs. human voting. That said, I'm not ready to call it harvesting. I also think there needs to be incentive to hold Steem Power and those who have it can do with it as they wish. I'm currently using Steem Voter to support a handful of authors and friends who I think regularly bring real value to Steemit. Before, I'd miss some of their posts and be sad that I didn't vote them up in time. Now that the voting window is longer, a good case could be made that there's time to catch them all, but I still like the idea of using my Steem Power to support authors I like. That means I don't read every single post and sometimes it means I have to go remove a vote if it's a post I don't really like. If, however, those authors usually provide valuable content to the community, I think it's a good thing to consistently support them, whether that's done automatically or manually.