Mostly good idea. Some of my concerns:
- technically how to hide moderator's action? We are on a blockchain which doesn't have stealth feature yet.
- moderators need to know exactly the pending payouts of all posts, so they can decide whether it is needed to down-vote a post. That said, we can get that data from the blockchain, so likely there will be services to show that info to the public, so other people will know that data as well, although it can be hidden from Steemit.com.
- shitty contents are easy to be identified, but vote buying is hard to be identified when the post quality is OK.
- report button can be abused or sybil attacked.
//Edit: more:
- downvotes cast by moderators can be abused or be wrong, perhaps they need be able to be cancelled / healed by other moderators (it's addressed in @timcliff's modified proposal: https://steemit.com/steem/@timcliff/snowflake-s-really-interesting-proposal-turn-whales-into-moderators-and-give-dolphins-all-the-voting-power-tldr-version)
Good points.
Hidding it on the interface level would be easy and suffice imo. I really would like to see the word downvote turn into moderation vote just for the general sentiment, and so that when people looking at the blockchain don't misinterpret it.