You do have some good points. This world has gotten too sensitive. We should all be able to express ourselves without fear of reprisal or offending others.

There is a significant distinction between Steemit and other platforms like YouTube and Facebook. That difference is that those platforms censor content centrally. You have one entity controlling the content for the entire platform. Billions of people are censored by one entity. That is not good!

Steem is built in such a way where one entity shouldn't be able to do that, though it can happen if someone has enough Steem Power and there are not enough accounts with similar or greater levels of Steem Power to counteract the downvotes, I suppose. There may be exceptions for illegal content. Steemit Inc has an obligation to censor illegal content, I believe.

But we aren't talking about illegal content here. We are talking about content that has been banned from those platforms because the central entity considered them offensive or because of political pressure. Content like hunting and fishing. These activities have been a way of life for millennia. None of us would be here if it weren't for our ancestors hunting and fishing to survive.

We do all have a voice and the upvote and downvote (flag) is there as a way for us to express that voice. We should be able to express ourselves freely through our votes and use of the flag when necessary (hopefully sparingly) as well, as long as it is an individual expressing their upvote/flag in a way that they chose and not an central entity censoring content globally.

For example, today I saw a comment on a community member's post that said, something to the effect of "I can't believe you killed a fish, you asshole." The word "asshole" was a link to disgusting pornographic GIF. I flagged the comment because I don't want that as part of our community discussion. While the person who made the comment and posted the link had a right to do that, I also have the right to flag that. If someone else comes along with higher Steem Power and upvotes it, well then I guess it becomes visible again. This is one reason we should consider increasing our Steem Power, so we have greater influence on the platform.

That being said, I also agree that generally speaking we should leave well enough alone here. If we don't like something we can choose not to upvote it and move on. That makes a statement as well.

We can also try to be conscientious as well. We don't need to go around haphazardly offending others just because we can.

This response is probably too politically correct again but I am just expressing some thoughts from what I consider a balanced perspective.

I hope my words don't get picked apart but they probably will. That's okay.

One way to combat any flagging we disagree with is to make sure each of us in the community are upvoting the content we like and believe has value. I hope we can do more of that and less flagging.

I hope we can focus on hunting, fishing and firearms posts going forward here. I don't want this thing to turn into a big political discussion.