RE: The Politics of Negative Voting
You are correct. Yet that is your opinion; one which I share. Yet we would like this thing to take off like wild fire and the number one complaints you will see revolve in one way or another around money. "They are paying that much for that crap!" "I had X dollars and someone flagged me and I only have Y", to even people doing quite well complaining that most of their posts are under $5 when I am fine with many of mine being zero and most under $1. :) PERCEPTIONS do matter if we want mainstream adoption. I have not personally been hit by the flag taking money issue. I've seen it happen quite a few times though and that is with pretty smart people on here at the moment. What happens when more and more of the status quo get on here. It literally will be a shit storm unless we deal with it before then while we are in beta and we all are the test subjects.
People who whine about what other people get are not usually very creative or productive people anyway. Or at least they are missing the point of the addition of money into this system, which is really about making people think more about how they throw their votes about, and creating an opportunity cost to mitigate moral hazard, which includes sheepish behaviour, spamming, plagiarizing, etc. 'put your money where your mouth is' in my opinion sums up the key thing about Steemit. Clicks are cheap. But when they cost you money, you think a bit more about it. The same thing should apply to flagging as well. It should definitely cost to flag, quite a lot.