Sometimes wealthy Steemians will wage their influence in order to stymie access to information that they don't agree with.
For the most part, people are flagged so that they won't earn money for their shitposts, and hopefully eventually stop shitposting. Your "apparently" is intentionally obtuse and misleading.
Imagine, if you will, a busker whose been hard at work performing music for several hours on any given day. The busker sees that he now has just enough to rent that motel room, and purchase a little food, and right as he is packing up his musical instrument; someone walks up, pours gasoline in his tip jar, and then sets it aflame.
Well that's very similar to downvoting (or flagging) on Steemit, and maybe that's been Steemit's plan all along in order to thwart hyperinflation... Who knows?
You seem to be confused. The money a post earns isn't the author's until the voting is entirely complete, flags included. It does not belong to the author until all the votes are cast.
It's not similar at all. Flagging can't take anything away from you.
If you want an analogy, it would be like believing you won an election when the votes are only halfway counted.
the way in which Steemit has implemented it, it allows wealthy people to destroy value
Wrong again. The rewards are distributed to other authors and curators—just not the shitposter who got flagged.
RE: Will Flagging Ultimately End up Killing the Steemit Platform?