Hey mate, thanks for the comment.

As mentioned in the other reply to your comment, what we are dealing with here is human nature.

You don't think people have been trying to educate folk to be a little more discretionary with how they judge (negatively) other people over the centuries?

This behaviour is ingrained in humans, its the competitive, law-of-the-jungle instinct, it is super-hardwired into our brainstems.

The idea of flagging for spam is ok... but how does it work out in reality?

"Using them to flag spam, plagiarism and various forms of token manipulation"

The problem is, how do we define it? Plagiarism is fairly easy to define and identify, although we could use with the coding to allow canonical links to allow syndication across platforms without affecting SEO and appearing to be plagiarised content.

Spam though? Is it just the frequency of content posting? HF20 and the RC-cost was meant to take care of that, and it crippled anyone below minnow status (majority of accounts). Has it actually worked? Has anyone run the numbers to see if spamming has reduced because of the HF20 changes?

I think taking photos of your dinner is spammy. I think Life Coaches who write advertorial to promote themselves is spammy. But do the creators of that content share my opinion? I guarantee they don't. I think there is a grey area, and it's that grey area that is of concern to me.

"We should also take actions against those that are misusing them."
How do we do this? And does creating a 'free' amount of flagging (downvotes that don't 'cost' your RC) help this or hinder it?

Feel free to continue the conversation in the palnet forum here