We're pretty sure that you won't get downvoted or flagged by stating your opinions and being vocal about what you think. Those downvotes came because of the bid bot buying that almost killed steem over the past year. Proof of brain, what steem is about, is killed by vote buying and now we have a tool to fight these bid bots.
I'm sure these downvotes are not to push you out of the platform or put on a mask or follow rules. The bid bots are mainly used for abuse, you remember the frontpage back when it didn't matter how good was your content, but how much low quality users were willing to spend in "promoting" a post (with tons of revenue including).

The thing is, you might be a good content creator, but if everyone thought like you, we would have again 500 bids per day on shitty content and the organic content, the good authors would get unnoticed and they would leave.

Right now, there is more than 10 million steem power that was formerly used to sell votes, who is now manually curating. Do you know how much money that represents for authors? Authors who don't buy votes, authors who spend a lot of time creating content and actually receive votes because now, if a user uses bots, they get flagged. People stop using bots, the bots are forced to manually curate and voila, you have a whole new ecosystem made of manual curation where the rewards go to the ones who deserve it thanks to their amazing content, the rewards don't go to a random author who decided to bidbot the crap out of his shitpost.

Granted, receiving flags hurts and makes you want to rage and quit. But look at it that way. The flags are a temporary measure to create a permanent solution: manual curation back at its fullest.

Atte anomadsoul