Yeah, at first my understanding when I joined was that the flag should only be used for plagiarism, abuse, or spam; Now I have learned that we can downvote basically anything that doesn't match with our opinions.
Wish I had this explained to me in the beginning that there are extra uses for the flag. Then I would not have fought all those people in the past that were "flagging inappropriately"!
Having downvote seperate from flag would help.
Yeah, I agree. That really would help! Like the user below my comment described, he wants to avoid being flagged yet doesn't understand why people get flagged; The reason is that there really are no rules or guide lines for how to use the flag.
If it was changed to downvoting then no one would take offense and everyone would just understand it is an opinion.