Could the same result plus a bit more not be accomplished by utilizing flags VS what someone views as too highly paid content? I feel as though the community under-utilizes the flagging mechanism out of fear, which needs to be overcome. @berniesanders and his plethora of monikers such as @nextgencrypto, @rewardpoolrape, @theyeti, @randowhale, etc. for instance, they could use more flagging against them. They're the definition of abuse of the platform. He always flags back out of revenge because he's a child, but ultimately, it helps the platform if he's wasting VP and people are negating his VP that he always allocates to himself out of greed.
At any rate, consider this 100% upvote to this post as a contribution from @agoric.systems :-). Burning stake is always good, but I feel as though negating abuse via flags is a better alternative as it prevents reward pool allocation being given to parties that do not deserve it.
This is a tiny, tiny, tiny dent in the issue, but hey, every penny counts, right?
Not exactly the same results as flagging (aka downvoting) just shifts rewards to other posts. If the problem is simply too many rewards being chased by too few truly valuable contributions then the shifting means other (less noticed) abuse and low value content being better rewarded, and an even higher incentive to post more of those.
I'm all in favor of flagging of garbage or anything that you think doesn't add value, and in this case we can set a baseline of add more value than burning.