The concept of downvoting was changed to flagging only recently, and disincentivizing abuse is not its only use.
It does not seem right or fair that anyone should be allowed to devalue a post by flagging it for no good reason.
It's right and fair. Steem Power is an ownership stake in Steem. I've used downvotes on posts where I feel there is a negative benefit to the value of Steem as a whole to reward the poster. Here's an explanation I gave on one of these (rare) occasions:
My philosophy on my actions taken on Steem and Steemit is that whatever they are, the actions should be meant to increase the value of both. In this case, downvoting you for presenting an idea that I believe would lower the value of Steemit and thus my stake in Steem is a rational action in line with the philosophy of maximizing value.
In other words, I believe Steem should not be paying the users who seek to lower its value, whether they do it intentionally or not. As a moderate stakeholder in Steem as a whole, I have a voice (albeit smaller than many) in where the rewards go. And I'll use a downvote when I see it to be valuable to Steem as a whole.
Therefore, I propose a change whereby flags must be accompanied by a publicly stated brief reason for flagging, to be shown as a special kind of comment.
It's usually a good idea and courteous, plus value giving, to comment on why a downvote was made. But there are a lot of serial spammers and auto-posting bots that to make a comment for each downvote would be frivolous. This is more of a social issue than a blockchain one.
There should also be a means of challenging a flag whereby it can be removed if enough users agree with the challenger, perhaps by indicating their agreement through voting on this flag comment accordingly.
No
I take your points. However, I have to disagree with the idea of using flags to indicate disapproval for a post just because you may think it lowers value - in that case, simply don't vote. The devs have clearly indicated that they want flagging to be treated differently than the downvoting you describe, by calling it flagging, giving it an icon than isn't a down arrow, and by placing the button elsewhere. I think the ergonomic/psychological intention of this is clear - flagging is not intended to be used as the opposite of upvoting, but is to indicate a post that is in contradiction of the community's code.
With regard to your point about bots, following from @dan 's latest announcement on the subject I think we're going to see a lot of improvement on that front anyway, which would lesson any bot-related problems with my proposed solution.
Doing nothing and allowing someone to be rewarded for lowering the value of Steem would be worse than doing my part in stopping it. I have a stake in Steem, and it's in my interest to protect its value.
Sure, I can get behind that. Perhaps then we need a separate system of downvoting. In my opinion, flagging should not be viewed in the same way, and I think the devs agree by making it different in the UI.
Summary of discussion in chat:
gs: Steemit UI matters most
pf: Steem is the meat and potatoes
gs: Steemit UI says flag
pf: Steem is upvote/downvote
gs: Steemit UI is all that matters because most people use it
pf: I use Steem CLI for many votes. You can flag abuse, and I can downvote when I feel it increases the value of Steem. We'll keep our concepts mutually exclusive :)
Senseless downvoting when the post is not spam, plagarism or offensive will devalue the platform as surely as censorship will devalue Twitter.