Great piece on this issue 🤔 I like your measured writing approach.
The flaw with this and Ayn Rand's approach in general is that it an extremely narrow reading of human nature. However I do agree that incentive structures work best were there is little commonality between people. For example, we do really know each other here, much less so when new, so it works well in this context.
It take a lot more work to deal with the many messy community structures we can conceive of together than to make broad maxims about self-interest. The debate here could go on right down to self-gene level 😅 It can be well argued that everything, even seemingly altruistic behavior is in fact self-interest. Then what's the difference?
I would say that incentives such as we see on Steemit leverage the short-term self-interest which is more about the individual and current needs, as opposed to long term self-interest which may be about long terms goals at the expense of short-term gain, or in the interest of a group more so than the individual, to gamble on support from them. Or something like that. But my point is that there will always be more to it and community solutions can also work.
That said, I think this could be a good idea:
If a flag is rejected by the community, the flagger has potential to lose money.
The challenge is how to arrange it. @inertia has a good idea. There was a [poll version too] that looks interesting by @winstonwolfe, you two might have common ground on it.