Maintaining an environment where people can't pass off bullshit as truth, where open dialogue can be had... Is extremely important (imo).
You have a valid point here, but I also insist on mine: too many people left or even didn't/don't/won't join STEEM because of omnipresent flag abuse (just recently a potential investor from Switzerland told me he saw all these flaggs, even under official Steemitblog posts, and thus won't buy STEEM for sure).
We Steemians are so accustomed to this that sometimes we aren't aware anymore how devastating the impression for people outside of our microcosm is ...
It's OK for me not to implement the new muting feature, but then there should be other solutions, like for example the idea of an 'anti abusive flag committee' which I suggested above.
But flags (downvotes) are a part of content value discovery ... Their use is supposed to be how the system works. The coming downvote pool will make this more obvious I suspect.
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Of course they are. I never wrote anywhere I was against the option to flag.
But many flags are not used in that sense. For example for quite a while every single comment of @valued-customer got flagged automatically by a whale. That had nothing to do with discovering value or preventing spam (actually the whale added a spam comment under every flagged comment). And that's just one example among many.
If there was an 'anti-abusive-flag-committee' its members would recognize such kinds of flags very easily and could counter them.
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