RE: It Is Time for Separating Downvotes from Flags
Hi @tibonova. Thanks for the kind words!
There is actually a lot of discussion about this behind the scenes. I think there are plans to have flags and downvotes be two separate things. It is largely a question of implementation at this point.
Time is also the other factor. Flagging is one of those things that needs to be figured out for the site to be successful, but it is not going to bring millions of new users to the platform. There are some other things that are higher priority at the moment, so any major changes to the flagging/downvote system are going to take a back seat for now.
I did submit a pull request a few weeks ago, which should hopefully be accepted and put up onto the live site soon. It will hide the flag counter from posts/comments so that they don't stand out compared to non-downvoted posts unless they are downvoted to the point that they have a negative voting score. It doesn't solve the whole problem, but it should at least alleviate some of the annoyances.
Putting customer aquisition before user retention is a horrible idea, imo.
I hear you. There are a lot of changes that need to be done between now and "non-beta". Flagging is definitely one of them. It is something that in theory could be done 'off chain' by just turning the current flag back into an actual downvote and adding a separate flag system at the GUI level. I think from Steemit's perspective they would rather focus on the major changes that are going to allow the system to scale (including support for sites like busy.org), and worry more about the UI level changes later this year / next year.
I don't agree with only UI level changes since it would be only on Steemit. I expect many more UIs and custom implementations where a downvote shouldn't be a flag.
No one could cry out flag abuse until this thing is done.
True. As multiple UIs pop up though - they all may want to handle 'flagging' differently, whereas a downvote will always be a downvote. There is still a lot to discuss regarding the way to handle this. Nothing is decided yet / set in stone.
I'm personally very confused about how does the reputation score work. I sometime downvote post that I believe have a too much exposure on the front page. By doing so am I affecting their rep score negatively more than what they've earned from the post ?
Do you know of where I could find the details of how it work ?
As long as the post payout is positive, then the user's reputation score will not go down. If someone downvotes a high paying post (but not enough for the payout to reach zero) then it just means the person's reputations score will go up less. (Since the post has a positive payout, the overall affect on the reputation from all the votes combined is still for it to increase.) Does that make sense?
Also, if you have a lower reputation than someone, no matter what you do - you cannot make their reputation go down. Only someone with a higher reputation can cause a score to go down.
There are a lot more details here (search for "reputation"):
https://steemit.com/steemit/@shenanigator/thanks-to-your-help-the-official-steemit-faq-is-now-complete
If you have any other questions, let me know :)