And this is why I've always felt they should have no power. (ie. be purely cosmetic) I think the simple reality is flags don't actually work as intended. They do at the mechanical level, but not in a way that does what they were designed to do.

Someone posts some garbage on trending, people try to rally together to flag it and it's flies vs a bull. Easily overcome, and cheaply at that, with bidbots.

The ONLY cases where I see flags working as the user is intending is bullying, silencing, and whale wars, all things bad for the platform. Weighing that against actually thwarting the occasional spammer or plagiarist, and I think we'd be better off just not having them.

There's probably a more effective way to actually do what the design was for(have the crowd curate) What we have just doesn't work. It's not a rampant problem now, but if the platform grows, so will the amount of people that will abuse this.