Steem is about allocating funds to those who bring value. To be able to do that, we need a way to express our will to both increase and decrease the payment for a post or comment.
Having only a downvote flag leaves a big gap in terms of user experience: there is no way to decrease a payment when there is nothing wrong with a given post but you just feel that it has received a bigger payout than it deserves and you want those funds to be allocated elsewhere.
Thus Steem should offer two ways of performing a downvote:
- a payment downvote: to be used when you feel that a given post (or comment) has received a bigger payout than it deserves
- a spam/abuse downvote: to be used for flagging (and unflagging) spam and abuse (as the downvote flag is meant to be used now)
As we have it now, almost all trending posts are flagged, suggesting that all those posts are spam or abuse. Also, there is no way to outvote those flags - any troll can just go trough all posts and flag them, thus making the spam/abuse indicator completely useless.