I also believe @thoughts-in-time is making a good point. It is very clear that whales are abusing on flags, just because "they don't like the content", not because the content is truly offensive. What I can't understand is this felling that whales do so, because they "earn more" of the steemit.com domain. So they can act like the "content-editor", only based on the size of their pocket. As a business model, for me it sounds like a future failure. People fear to be flagged (because this tends to lead to being ethereally flagged by some whale downvoting-bots). And people are leaving you "earned Steemit.com" because of that.
... and also because of the voting-bots, which keep promoting low quality content.
I am a new user. It only took me one month to understand all that.
Although I see the tremendous potential behind Steemit birth-ideology... I also see the sickness spreading on it... and I am still not sure if there is enough time to fix that, given that new platforms are coming and might overtake tempestuously fast.
b.b.