RE: Follow-Up Poll: Expanding "Mute"
However I can also see it leading to an author being more able to spread disinformation and removing all critical comments making it seem legitimate.
That's one side of the medal. On the other hand I see many flags given just because of different opinions, personal animosities or even for fun.
Maybe a committee of elected users with some delegated Steem power from Steemit, Inc. might help, which could decide (in case someone complains) if flags are justified or not, and if "yes" just counter them with upvotes.
In addition, accounts who repeatedly misuse flags in an abusive way (instead using them against spam, plagiarism etc.) could be flagged, as well, after a decision of that committee.
If abusive flags could be countered like that, I would agree not to take further measures to protect the blog or an author.
Muting a user is not going to stop them from abusively flagging you. Assholes are gonna asshole. We have to accept some bad things are going to happen sometimes. However this proposal has the potential to open up abuse that is far worse. Maintaining an environment where people can't pass off bullshit as truth, where open dialogue can be had... Is extremely important (imo).
You have a valid point here, but I also insist on mine: too many people left or even didn't/don't/won't join STEEM because of omnipresent flag abuse (just recently a potential investor from Switzerland told me he saw all these flaggs, even under official Steemitblog posts, and thus won't buy STEEM for sure).
We Steemians are so accustomed to this that sometimes we aren't aware anymore how devastating the impression for people outside of our microcosm is ...
It's OK for me not to implement the new muting feature, but then there should be other solutions, like for example the idea of an 'anti abusive flag committee' which I suggested above.
But flags (downvotes) are a part of content value discovery ... Their use is supposed to be how the system works. The coming downvote pool will make this more obvious I suspect.
Of course they are. I never wrote anywhere I was against the option to flag.
But many flags are not used in that sense. For example for quite a while every single comment of @valued-customer got flagged automatically by a whale. That had nothing to do with discovering value or preventing spam (actually the whale added a spam comment under every flagged comment). And that's just one example among many.
If there was an 'anti-abusive-flag-committee' its members would recognize such kinds of flags very easily and could counter them.