Everyone is happy with checkless upvotes. You said yourself, you want decentralized. Post (and comment) rewards are decided by the community. This goes in both directions. Upvotes are abused far more often than downvotes.
This is coming from someone who has 11,000+ downvotes in the last 30 days and has to pay to keep my comments visible due to malicious flagging. I am likely the most flagged person on the platform in the last 3 months. All malicious.
Yet here I stand telling you that if flags were removed this place would die.
In the rare case, flags are abused, the community can step in and correct it. You said yourself you don't even think you have ever been flagged so it is obviously not a rampant epidemic. I can assure you abusive upvoting (upvotes on plagiarism, spam, fraud) is.
Without flags, this place would be a shit hole overnight.
Look at what @fulltimegeek is doing. He can get away with it because Steem Cleaners isn't technically prepared for this sort of thing (going against 100 bots) and @fulltimegeek is large enough he can bully people around. The moment flags are gone, 90% of the userbase that are spammers will have a field day. Even legitimate users will have a difficult time avoiding the easy way out of just posting 10 nonsense post/comments and upvoting them and moving on with their day.
I respect that you disagree, I just do not see a future for Steem without flags. Not as a content platform with a shared reward pool.
I have only been around steemit 6 months and have been flagged twice by random trolls for no reason. My posts were decent and passworthy. It seemed like irrational flagging. I noticed it in the busy.org list of notifications, otherwise would not have known.
To attract just malicious flagging as you have @themarkymark does seem more like a personal vendetta or alpha male competitor. You get 5% of the planet who are born sociopaths so there will always be a loose cannon on board any steemship.
Those flags were from @camillesteemer
All 7 of those flags don't even add up to 1 cent. It's just a troll with 300 accounts upset that they were flagged for spam. So he flags random people with his accounts that have no Steem Power.
As for my flags, they are personal. @fulltimegeek is upset he wasn't allowed to buy votes on his account that posted 16K comments a day, so now he is flagging me ~11,000 times a month.
My goodness, that is truly hectic. What a nutter.
And I respect the stance you take as well. I'm still worried about it being abused by mainstream media or some other organization with deep pockets, but you make a good argument.