It's not even that it gets hidden. In fact, hidden posts kind of stand out to me, and I seem to be even more likely to click them to see why they got hidden in the first place. It's the fact that the rewards of hundreds minnows and even reputation can be severely diminished with a single vote. This hasn't really been too much of a problem up until now, but if steemit starts gaining more widespread attention, the probability of corporate, government, and other nefarious actors covertly buying huge stakes increases drastically.
You have to imagine yourself at the bottom of the pecking order when establishing the rules of the game. Right now the worst that we see is an occasional ned flag, but that example can give a glimpse into the impact of special interests that want to dominate a narrative. People will know that if they want rewards on their post, they better not say anything bad about coca-cola, or the gov, or anyone else that controls the shares.
Well the hiding of it is symbolic as well as adding a barrier to engagement, there's no dispute on that.
The gov / corp argument though is interesting. Something like that occurred to me early on when I joined but I thought there was no real way to protect against that. Stakeholders are king here. If a large enough stakeholder comes in and ruins everything, you're looking at a Ethereum style fork after the DAO attack.
So do you suggest removing the flag entirely? @sneak seems to think we'd be better off without it, though admits we need it to counter abuse. How can we have it's abuse countering features without it's possible information suppressing features?
I actually agree with sneak there completely, which I find odd since I just upvoted and resteemed a couple of his flags with freezepeach. He's exactly right though; we need flags/DVs for abuse, and it's better to UV content you like instead of DVing content you disagree with. I don't agree with his minimum weight/rep solution as being a good fix, but it could be marginally better than what we have now.
I also understand that you can fork out any problem accounts that arise, and it may come to that eventually, but this solution is only a temporary fix which addresses the symptom of the problem instead of addressing the root cause.
We need a solution that does away with the flagging feature but also allows for spammers/plagiarists to have their rewards negated. Some have suggested an elected committee of moderators that solely have the power to flag, but that seems as easily corruptible to me as what we have now. I don't know the solution either, but I bet someone out there will figure one out if enough people talk about it.
Yea you may be right. At this moment I endorse flags because there is no better alternative, as you say. I'm not stuck to flags as a solution but I'm stuck to their being a solution. The committee idea is absolutely terrible in every way. But if a better solution is presented I would back it without hesitation if it could be shown to be better.
I think flagging should stay, but we need to reinforce that it's for abuse not disagreement. It would be interesting if downvoting actually risked SP too, so if you try to downvote something and the community comes to defend it, you permanently lose some stake. The premise is that consensus exists about what's abusive, and that SP held by supporters of that consensus outweighs SP held by those who oppose it. Given the nature of Steem, I think if either of those is false it will require forking people out until they're true. The network can't survive without sufficient consensus on both its technical and social protocols.