Ok, so, as I said to @fitinfun, I think we agree here, I am being perhaps a bit obtuse philosophically, because its saturday morning and I love a good philosophical discussion.
If this money pool function is not working, then steemit is fucked
Probably true, but I think it is working. Let's check out @haejin's page - I see thousands of dollars in the last few days. The only thing hidden is a resteem by @libertyteeth, who, for good or bad, decided to go toe-to-toe with bernie.
Is this not what a functioning society looks like? Did someone tell you that it would be rainbows and unicorns all the way?
up-an-downvote bots are obviously worthless.
Bots are tools made by humans. That humans can be terrible is, historically, accurate.
Our 'job' here is to use our stakes to determine what is valuable. That not all people will agree is recognized in the whitepaper. The system is working.
Here is my thinking. We have our incentives misaligned. steemit has more valuable content than spam or plagiarism. Minnows barely earn any curation and for whales loss of curation doesn't matter much.
So what if make flags cost 3% or even 4% voting power instead of 2%. There is less incentive to flag. Positive reinforcement works better than negative reinforcement. There will always be abusers and bad actors.
Not many would go around flagging left and right if they had to choose between 3 upvotes+positive interaction+curation rewards Vs 2 Flags+negativity.
People will require of themselves a very good reason to use their VP on flags. So naturally the flags would concentrate on content than can easily be identified as "Bad for steemit" (Spam, plagiarized content, promoting terrorism, spreading false info etc.)
Don't try to control actions. Instead, adjust the incentives and actions would follow.
Don't try to make things perfect. Keep it simple. Keep it elegant. Too many moving parts means too much complexity means too many ways things could go south.
I agree with your underlying analysis of incentives!
I think charging more VP for a flag could be a very elegant solution, to ease things in the right direction.