For the longest of times we've been talking about the importance of flags for this system to actually work. Of course, there's the abuse of them, the unproductive fights and what have you, but all in all they've always been a net positive in my opinion. That being said something the word flag always had a terrible connotation.
I'm glad that Steemit Inc has changed condenser's front end to now say downvotes. To me this not only made sense because it's more familiar to an outside user looking in, but because it has a different association all together. Flags to me is content you label for removal on legacy social media, and as we know what gets written on this blockchain is here to stay, so it didn't quite make much sense.
On the other hand, downvotes is precisely what you would find in forums and the ever popular reddit. If a comment or a post is not that valuable, or it's plagiarism, etc, then users just downvote it. Again outside of the outliers and bad actors, the idea being that people act in their own best interest due to the consequence of not doing so. If I'm an asshole in real life people around me let me know, it's very much the same.
I applaud Steemit Inc for making this move, and doing so rather quickly.
MenO