Yeah the flagging is pretty weird, and it does hurt people's potential payouts and/or their Reputation (Little number in parenthesis) which is basically the same thing as the whole Karma thing that reddit has going. It's actually pretty cool to watch your Rep # jump gradually on Steemnow.com ! Overall, you brought up some pretty good points (: I think that if they made the chat feature more like Facebook's, that would be a huge accomplishment. Not that Facebook is revolutionary, but people do tend to like how their messaging system works; It's very easy to use and always accessible. But yeah with the flagging, they should just let you drag the upvote slider in the opposite direction without having to click on the flag. But, then again, people need at least 500 Steem Power before they can even choose what % they want to vote. So I'm not sure if that would work...