@dantheman I understand that you try your best to protect steem with flagging for tag abuse, but currently especially with the new reputation system this creates a lot of collateral damage.
Many newbies come, post something with wrong tags, get hidden by a whale for it and then happen to be invisible though the new reputation system.
I would suggest to let people simply vote what tags are right or wrong like other platforms do.
What also could help is some kind of yellow card, that warns a user of his wrongdoing. A yellow card can reduce the payout, maybe not that drastically like a flag, but is not counted for the reputation score.
What would help greatly is having clear Rules, expectations and the social contract pinned very prominently on the menu bar. Right now I don't see a place where newbies can get oriented with the community rules quickly, right at the start, and review those rules if any doubts.
I strongly agree! Especially in tiny foreign language speaking communities, this can be devastating. To quote myself:
"The german speaking steem community so far is so tiny that yesterday a whale megadownvote of one of its members by an english speaking whale had eradicated quite a proportion of it and caused a certain stirr, with other german speaking steemers posting the letter of the downvoted guy in solidarity and protests of censorship on Steemit risking to go viral in Germany before Steemit had even got viral itself!"
https://steemit.com/steemit/@fabio/speaking-of-ants-the-germants-are-endangered-here