Despite most social media platforms use of a "down vote" button, facebook refused to give in to the many petitions for a "dislike" button, opting instead for emoji's or "reactions".
If Mark Zuckerberg believed that a "dislike" button was too negative for a social network then what happens when you add monetary penalties?
Steemit is 1 year into this exciting experiment and we've seen ups and downs. One thing we can say for certain though, is most users don't like to be flagged.
There may still need to be a way to "flag" in cases of "abuse", but there are ways that we could diminish the need to use the down-vote to redistribute the rewards of a subjectively "over-valued" post.
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Payout Recommendations
When a large stakeholder or group of stakeholders upvote a post the payout estimate goes up. Lets say the payout reaches $50. When the first curators voted they voted for it to make more than $0.00. It was the last voters who pushed it to $50. How do we know the first upvoters consider this an appropriate payout? The only information given to the Steem Network was an upvote along with a weight, which doesn't say very much. If stakeholders could vote for a payout recommendation we could prevent the need to reign payouts in, because in many cases they may not become excessive in the first place. The system has more information available to it to make better payout decisions earlier.
We already use Median in Steem Because it is a Robust Statistic
The price of Steem Backed Dollars is determined by the median of the price feed over the last week. This reduces the volatility of the peg, while preventing outliers from having adverse impact. These are the same objectives we should have with payout estimates! Volatility is the source of the pain of loss aversion. Excess is what we are trying to police with downvotes. While there will still always be scope for deliberate abuse, preventing the need to police unintentional excess may reduce most of the problem.