You are balling people up and falling into generalization traps while you suggest that they are not wise enough to recognize the obvious implications of not policing the network. It's not about purely maximizing profits or they would simply divide the stake into alts and self vote relentlessly. Rational is the key word. You also cannot blame them for what is a collective effort and responsibility and largely market speculation. You don't know what the price of steem should be, it could have been vastly overpriced and we are correcting, you don't know that you don't even know. Let me ask you simply, were you around for the Whale Experiment?
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Apart from the fact that I don't like the term "policing", I never wrote that I am against the downvote option in general. My main comment under this article makes my position clear.
In the article "My STEEM Vision." I give some reasoning why I think maximization of profits like we see it here is shortsighted and doesn't lead to long-term success. The development of the STEEM price seems to confirm my point of view.
Just look thoroughly at accounts like - for example - the one of sweetsssj or haejin, and then answer the question if some big users aren't exactly doing that.
Just check how the rank of STEEM in CoinMarketCap got worse and worse. I see no reason at all why the STEEM value should have "corrected" so much more than the one of its 'crypto colleagues', apart from the one, that the STEEM community wasn't working well due to the greediness of some members and due to a system that made this greediness even more beneficial, because it's gamable too easily. (That's why I am for example in favour of a convergent rewards curve.)
Same applies to you.
But thinking is allowed, nevertheless, and my conclusions after thinking differ from yours.
Apart from that I am an investor myself, as well, and I would have invested more under different conditions. So for me the described whale behaviour does matter. Actually, I dare to claim I am not alone with this perception.
The only thing I can offer you here is to agree to disagree.
It seems I am already longer here than you think ...
I am not claiming whales were anyhow worse people than average, but having the power makes them more dangerous (if other people were on top, probably they wouldn't act less shortsighted in average). Thus I plead to institute a system that prevents flag abuse.
I could start listing names with an @ in front of them. Yes, I could do that, but then at the same time should be prepared for the end of my STEEM authorship. :)
Yes, maybe I will reach the point that I don't care their flaggs anymore ... and then you will get your list.
Actually, under this article one can observe it again: people (whales!) are flagging comments of other users just because they disagree with their opinion!
NOT because of any abuse or over rewarded posts.
That is our problem here.
Lol, it's really hard to understand the way these 'gods' are thinking.
To be serious: come onnn, they are human like you and me and obviously cannot stand different opinions.
I can read and think very well. And when I read the flagged posts, they obviously contain no spam, abuse or over valued rewards.
For example elected committees with enough delegated SP could be a try to solve the problem of flag abuse.
Why are you telling these stories rather than showing data? If someone makes a proposal, they have to back it up with data, no?
If you do your homework - define your success metrics and gather the data and show it to the community - you will get immediate agreement, don't you think?
If you don't have the research or data skills to do this, ask for assistance. Many will be happy to help, myself included. We have some excellent statisticians doing good work. You can also check out this post for some ideas for success metrics.
More science, less arguing for the validity of your logic and telling stories to convince others.
What is a big problem with a more scientific approach as I'm suggesting? @vandeberg mentioned that the social sciences have been struggling due to the complexity they are dealing with and difficulty in controlling for variables. However, this can be overcome with appropriate methodology and research and data skills. Books such as Lean Analytics lay out many of the aspects in detail.
If you don't want to do science, fine, but the probability of things going wrong increases, and I don't see too much acknowledgement of that.