Thank you for posting this @timcliff. I do have a suggestion, or a change to one of yours actually:
A UI change to condenser (steemit.com) to change "flag" to "downvote".
How about separating the two. The internet in general has already defined flag as something bad. A downvote is not necessarily a bad thing. Say I write a quick post that happens to be picked up by a big whale and upvoted to $320. I mean, I'll take it, but I know my post isn't worth that much. I would have no problem with others voting that down. Now if you flagged me, now I see that as a problem, because it affects my reputation, not my steemit reputation, but my real reputation. I think that is a major cause of the flag wars happening right now.
So separate. A downvote doesn't equal a flag, but a flag equals a downvote and an alert to other users that objectionable content lies within.
Ok, I see now that @aggroed basically said the same thing, but I think keeping the downvote as a function of flags is key. Just make it so you can downvote without flagging. It might be good if downvotes only affected payout and flags affected everything they do now, to include payout.
There is discussion about doing just that. What we have today is a downvote. Nothing will change with that, other than possibly calling it a downvote instead of a flag.
If/when downvoting is renamed to downvoting, then we could implement a new ‘flag’ feature. The implementation details of what this would do is TBD.
Would the details of the downvote change too? I don't think downvotes should obscure posts unless they are downvotes coming from flags. Meaning after a post has reached 0, it should not be able to be downvoted any more because there are no rewards to disagree with. Thanks for answering my post.
I don’t think that would change. If a downvote isn’t a flag, there is no reason for the voter to take away all the rewards. As long as the post has some potential payout, it will still be shown.