I was an advocate for no downvote for a long time. The problem is that opens the door to gaming the system worse than it already is. Those with high power can purely up vote and collude to only put increasing amounts of the reward pool to themselves and their friends. They can up vote stuff with very little effort put into it but pay it out huge sums. Without a down vote there is no way to counter this.

The problem is that this is truly decentralized. There is no police force that can stop abuse. Even hidden posts are still visible on the blockchain if you use a different concentrator (website/app).

So while I don't like what the FLAG (currently) does. I have not thought of a way to get rid of it that won't open the door to more extreme abuses. This is the only reason I don't advocate it's removal.

I do think those that abuse it and use it to censor and oppress should be discouraged somehow and there are some groups that try to do that.