@kyle I'm agreed with your points of view I believed that the platform is set up in a very thoughtful way to not include down votes as a typical element in the Streamit community interaction.
This greatly improves the social cohesion of the community. Flags (what some call downvotes) should be minimally necessary in order to police rule beakers (breakers of social consensus.) To minimize flag abuse more effectively I would propose the following:
Add additional functionality to the "flag" feature which would provide the user name of the flagger and also would require the flager to provide a reason for flagging.---(this may be able to be provided quite efficiently by the use of a radio button to select from violation categories.) This way the community can also analyze the flag to see whether it was just, while also providing negative/positive feed back to the flagger. Additionally, I have also been preaching quite a bit of the need for a "community rules" tab to be attached prominently on the main menu bar. Steemit is a very new and unique social platform unlike anything that has gone before it. I listing of basic community rules would be very helpful for newbies to quickly understand the context in which we operate