What's more, STINC added "reward disputes" to their GUI after the first whale wars. These wars caused people to clamor for a fix and put the company under so much pressure that they lazily added it in as an additional catch-all reason for flags. Essentially, what they did was wash their hands of the problem by adding a new rule because there was no way for them to control how people used the flag tool. I think it was a pretty disgusting move because it allows for aberrant behavior.

After the BTC bubble deflated, they moved from not only allowing it but also trying to normalize it by changing the flag to a downvote button and placing it parallel to the upvote button. They're doing this in a desperate attempt to bolster Steem's market value, but they may as well be shooting themselves in the foot or cutting off their nose to spite their face because they're rapidly souring content curators and stakeholders to the platform.

All the while you have the witnesses who signed onto this mess whispering their siren song into your ears "just let it happen," "it will be over soon," muahahaha, "show us on the doll where the whale touched you." Justine didn't say that, but I'm not going to name drop. Name dropping isn't my goal. I aim to shine a light on this issue and let people know how many of the Untermensch content creators view this new downvote culture.

Just imagine going to the antique roadshow and approaching one of their curators/appraisers with an ancient vase from the Ming Dynasty. The curator says it's in good condition, you know, people will pay you top dollar for this, probably somewhere in the realm of $750,000. But I think it's shit. Then the curator takes the vase and smashes it violently on the floor. You look to the ground at the valueless bits and chunks and listen as they walk away laughing maniacally.

That's just one analogy against content disagreement. Content disagreement automatically falls into the reward dispute category because people naturally feel that content they disagree with is "over-rewarded." If you think about it that way, then everything is fair game, opinion flags and all.

There's another argument for why people should live and let live as opposed to downvote, and this is because all stake has merit. The moment a stakeholder thinks their stake doesn't have merit because their upvotes are thwarted, they dump to the market, and this causes the value of steem to go down unless there are buyers ready and willing to altruistically buy stake solely for the purpose to read content all day and curate as a full-time job.