ah man....its such a drag really. I can see how difficult a situation this is. We are all desperate to move away from censorship and centralisation, but we dont want to be inundated with spam, scam, and copyclam (you heard it here first!).
I'm just wondering whether you could have bins of content so that stuff isnt muted or made invisible, but just put in to the junk folder as it were, so that people can still browse it (there can even be trending junk!). If there was a high senate deciding which bins certain content goes in to...I mean its still a lot of power, but its like a curation job.
Ooo, and maybe the public get to label things as a part of the voting system. So for every content bin that gets created theres an extra option in the voting. Or maybe just the downvoting?
So when you downvote, theres a mandatory second step which is to categorize the downvote: Junk, Plagiarism, Negativity etc.
This way, a tribe can still publish articles that negatively impact its reputation, but have them bunched together in an alternative feed. That way at least users can choose when to engage in more critical conversation. It could be seen as a bold move on the part of any community to wear its criticism on its sleeve like that... I don't know, maybe Im just barking up a useless tree.....