When a post is upvoted, it's upvoted because the upvoter feels that particular post should be rewarded more. When a post is downvoted, it's downvoted because the downvoter feels that particular post should be rewarded less. It doesn't have to be anything personal, it's not like all upvotes are personal, either.
Wow - just, wow. It's extremely rare that I read something like this which completely changes the way I have thought about something.
A big part of the problem and why people (including myself) don't see it the way you are describing is because in the UI it is called "flagging" instead of "downvoting" which has a completely different connotation.
I've heard people say before that it shouldn't be called "flagging" but I didn't understand why and thought that "flagging" was a fine thing to call it because that's how I thought downvotes were supposed to be used.
Thanks to you it's clear to me now that downvoting and flagging are very different and I think SteemIt would benefit from having both. Downvoting would be what "flagging" is now - and should be used just like the opposite of upvoting.
Then a separate "flagging" feature should be added to flag posts that are illegal, inappropriate, spam, etc. Flagged posts would often also be downvoted, but downvoted posts would not necessarily often be flagged.
Thank you for this!
Yes, the flag should definitely be changed to downvote on the UI! It's a "downvote" everywhere else except the actual GUI.
Agreed, I found that very confusing as a new user. I guess the intent was to make "flag" sound more serious than "downvote"?
I agree that "flag" should be changed to "downvote" but not sure what a flag would then mean. On some sites, flagging reports it to "the authorities" who can then manually delete the post. Can't really see that happening here.
It would just be an indicator that the post has been flagged. Then it is up to the front-end sites how they want to deal with that. Many will probably opt not to show them on their site which accomplishes the goal nicely in my opinion.
This seems like a great idea to me. In fact, the front ends should probably implement the flagging system themselves. This way content that might somehow be a poor fit on one site wouldn't necessarily be flagged across the board.
You read my mind (and posted what i thought 2 minutes after me ;) )
I honestly want to know how to quote a text within a reply.
Just put a “>” as the first character in the line before the quoted text.
Thanks for this @yabapmatt