Why I dont participate in flag wars as a minnow

I am referring to "reward pool rape", meaning that people upvote among themselves, not based on the quality of the content at all. They just use their steem power to take out a part of the reward pool and that is not beneficial to the future growth of the platform.

I have seen a lot of posts asking to flag haejin's contributions or upvote the ones that get downvoted in retaliation. I want to briefly present, why I am staying neutral in this. My arguments are not based on any type of moral and just consider the status and future of steem.

Whales are invested in steem and therefore care for the future development of steem. Large scale misuse will hinder growth and push the price of steem down. Whales benefit more from a healthy growth of the platform than maximising their current profits. While this is true for the entirety of all whales, it does not apply to every whale individually. If only a few whales participate in "reward pool rape" the value of steem will remain stable and the whales acting against majority interest do benefit.

This is a typical problem of group interest versus individual interest and steem provides the tools needed to solve these issues. Other whales can band together and downvote haejin to stop the reward pool rape. And when they do this, they act in their own self-interest. Sure they are also helping the platform as a whole, but the system already provides the proper incentives.

As a minnow my interests are different. I am not committed to steem. I can make some money here, but if it fails I dont loose a lot and will make my money somewhere else. Of course I am also interested in a healthy development of the platform, but much less so than a whale. In fact, a healthy development can only be based on a broader distribution of steem. So if I get more steem that may be part of a healthy development :P

So should I flag abusers or heal the brave people that do this? I don't think so. If the whales fight that means the minnows delegate more of the reward pool and as a consequence more steem is distributed to us, helping the platform as a whole.

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I think this picture sums it up quite well. The big fish are stuck within the net (steem). It is in their interest to make sure the net does not get pulled. When they fight to keep the system running they are just fighting for their own survival.

There is one big difference, in steem the big fish actually control the net. They may make a big show and when they cannot agree there might be trouble. But we, the small fish, should not care. We just pass through the net. All the problems of the big fish are self-inflicted, we can just relax and let them sort it out. Whatever they do, they do out of self-interest since they are stuck. We don't owe them anything.