The whole ability of someone to organize a group of other people on Steemit to lower your reputation score is one thing that's going to prove a major hindrance to having people continuously create valuable content on this site. From the brief time I've been here, I've noticed that quantity seems to greatly overshadow quality when it comes to blogs, as a blog replete with misspellings detailing today's walk to the mailbox easily gets ten times (and in many cases hundreds of times) the upvotes a detailed blog about the first submersible used in war would, for example. I find that very curious given that I was told Steem values quality content.
I'm not particularly concerned with earning money or "reputation" here, but it'd be nice if people actually read blogs instead of just upvoting anything posted by people who have the ability to like their comment and thus give them a $1 payout.
I think you've nailed the point about why the ability to down vote is so dangerous and in almost all cases I've heard of leads to bullying not helping quality. Flagging to request real review of content or to add meta data like NSFW (again with actual review) is useful. Flagging as a mechanism for trolling is not. So baseless flagging is IMO as bad as baseless trolling.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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