That I was agreeing on. The FAQ is clear that downvoting can be for whatever, but the labeling of "Downvote" as "Flag" is highly misleading and sets all the wrong kinds of expectations not least that there is some real centralized abuse moderation system (I'm not saying we want that, just that people, especially noobs who haven't studied the FAQ thoroughly are misled that way). It's almost as if the Steemit UI designers wanted to highly discourage downvoting, isn't it?

To reiterate my point of contention - to downvote because you don't like how something was upvoted on is logically consistent within the system of "vote however you want" but is effectively a vote against the system itself. It is saying the personal thinks system of vote however you want is broken and that this person is going to have to police every single post that breaks their personal beliefs about what is a good upvote or not. What a waste!

As you point out consensus will win the day and the author is still getting some rewards. Perhaps eventually transisto will get bored of downvoting those posts. Or perhaps that user will power-down and leave the platform which I believe transisto and others will deem a win for the platform (I think that is what is happening).

Assuming no one wants to codify "rewards should be relative to page views" which transisto uses as his justification for downvote, then IMO the real problem here is that we have one or a few whales treating "Flag" as a traditional downvote in the Reddit sense and most minnows and many others who are not. If the one big downvote had been replaced by a dozen or downvotes by small fish then the OP might not have felt so picked on. They might not have felt like this was one capricious user throwing around their whale weight and more a vote of no confidence by the hive mind of Steemit.

I personally think the reward system is broken, but I don't see that working around it by having one or few whales arbitrarily downvoting particular users all the time to be a great way to do it. That's not really consensus, it's just authoritarianism brute force.

Short of a systematic fix I believe a better way is to find and reward good content and use nudges to change the behavior of those that upvote content deemed not in the best interests of Steemit. If you really are going to systematically downvote someone's posts then maybe a better way is to use a bot that does it in an egalitarian way, cites all the metrics and votes for the post you have a problem with. That will a) make it a lot less personal, b) make it fairer, c) cause less fighting.

That's the reason why at work my company uses a completely automated system to enforce software coding conventions. We form a consensus on the rules, and don't fight over individual infractions. Newcomers who don't like the rules may bitch and moan for a bit but they have to obey the same rules as everyone else. They have a channel to lobby for changes and have a say in future changes to the rules - by consensus. I've not yet seen anyone stop work or leave because they don't like the coding standard are enforced. What we never do is have some particular person(s) appointing themselves to be "cop" and enforcing the rules. I've seen how that causes no end of strife with personal disputes, plus inconsistent and uneven enforcement, just as we see here which only serves to make things even worse.