Good points. I still like to browse the introduceyourself posts and upvote new users who make an effort to verify themselves and make a good introduction. My small way of contributing in the spare time I have. I discovered a user who was spamming the same introduction posts (with virtually no content and just one picture) over 20 times spanning many days. I had a little dilemma, because I had warned them multiple times to stop reposting or I would flag as spam, but I didn't want to waste ALL of my voting power just to end one users spam. After several days of more reposts I finally decided to just flag them because it was just spam pure and simple, trying to suck up bots that still autovote introduceyourself posts. Anyway, probably lost ~10 SP from flagging them, but what are you gonna do? Still not sure what the solution to this problem is.
(Gratuitous self-upvoting because I think this is definitely an important topic.)
You point out the real pain point when it comes to downvotes. They use up your power and you do not earn curation. Like you said you missed out on 10sp...
Sure there are the long term incentives (what untimatly got you to flag in the first place) at play with downvotes but those incentives are far removed from the immediate incentives of curation rewards.
There must be a solution here. Curation rewards for flags? How would that work? No power for flags, that has problems. 3 free flags a day? That has its own misaligned incentives. I am not sure.
Thanks for the response!
Cheers