I've repeatedly raised my voice against any flag used on occasions where Non-Aggression Principle has been kept intact. As my friend @tibra very accurately said "Some people here treat this like 4chan or reddit: ``I like apples you like oranges." Steemit is already a way better version of Reddit and Blogger combined. But it is greatly different from those platforms due to mechanics involved. STEEM eco-system falls more in line with an MMO-RPG than a traditional social media. Here is another quote from @tibra

I told Ned: whenever anybody whose time is valuable and who'd be an asset to the community is shown this site, almost always what happens is they browse for a few minutes on their phone, and ask me why I suggested what I suggested.

How Reddit and Steemit does curation Differently

Reddit allows 1 vote per person and expect people to vote in a way that would make the most useful content appear on the top. There are no intrinsic rewards involved. You get nothing for voting. STEEM on the other hand gives curation rewards. The incentive is that if you upvote content that other people would also find important; then you'd get the intrinsic rewards of curation. So the idea is to incentive people to support more valuable content to create a positive feedback loop where good content receive more and more votes. Everybody is happy when there are rewards.

Flags remove these rewards. They makes the whole experience less pleasant. Sometimes a minor change on the paper can have massive consequences in a system and I'm not even talking about Chaos Theory and The Butterfly effect. Game designing is a great place where human psychology, human interaction and all sorts of human positivity in the world can com together. Steemit Inc can learn a lot from these Creators/ publishers of multiplayer games.

Making a small change

We all have used the equivalents of the dislike button at so many places as a way of saying we dislike something. But when financials are involved, saying you don't like/agree with something has a much larger effect. The flags are actually called downvotes in the blockchain level. Since rewards are allocated based on votes, one ca say that a downvote is a way of saying "All you upvoters were voting for the wrong stuff/ voting at wrong amounts. Let me fix that for you." Unless this is done on a clearly agreeable (objective) standard such as NAP, these downvotes can lead to time/resource wasting scenarios like flag wars.

Personally I've kept my flags reserved for spammers, plagiarists etc. That meant the default path for me at the face of content I don't like (Eg: Commie BS, Flat-Earth, General stupidity, badmouthing Hideo Kojima) was to just ignore them. there was no way I could simply express my opinion of dislike without messing with another persons potential rewards while negating the effects of the votes of those who upvoted the content. just imagine what would YouTube videos look like if there was only a net likes bar instead of showing Likes and Dislikes separately. Well that's steemit.

A Healthy way to communicate disagreement without comment

Imagine you had to fill up a small text box every time you upvote content describing why you are upvoting that content. That would be so annoying. The current nice and civil way to show disagreement is like that. It's too much of a pain to comment at all times. Flags are too aggressive. As shown in the above World of Warcraft scenario, a small change can completely shift the perception and improve the online experience of a certain product. So why not add a button which says "Dislike" or show a thumbs down icon. The effect of this icon can be implemented in different ways.

#1 No Financial Effect

This should be the easiest to implement. The dislike has zero effect on payout and one could show disagreement with no hard feelings involved. This should remove the bitter parts of flagging and make the community more pleasant.

#2 Downvote locked at a Fixed Percentage

When using steemit the smallest upvote/downvote (flag) percentage we are using is 1% So make the dislike have the effect of a downvote fixed at 1% and we are bringing the stake based voting into the mix. I think it is a good idea to add some stake based weight as VESTS(SP) are a primary part of the blockchain. People who invest more should have a bigger effect. That's free markets. But some might say that this isn't perfect.

#3 Downvote locked at a Fixed Percentage with an additional cap

Even I'm considered minnow by steemit standards. My 1% downvote won't be even worth a cent. But what about a Whale with few hundred dollars worth upvote? The entire point of the "Dislike"button was to keep the financial effects contained. For a minnow earning few bucks, a simple 1% from a whale could wipe out all earnings. We also have to consider comments which gain smaller votes.

Hence the need to cap the max effect of the "Dislike". I think 10 cents could be a good amount. But that would take some calculations. We could simplify it to something like 100% flag from a 1-2 MVESTS account (Currently it'costs 490.314 STEEM per MVEST).

I really hop this idea or something similar would get implemented to make the UX better for us all. Less isn't always more. A bigger vocabulary allows better communication. In a similar fashion, a wider range of actions to respond to posts will lead to better and less resource wasting interactions. So resteem and make the idea spread :-)