i dont have much SP, just over 100, so its kind of irrelevant, but i use its 0.05 upvotes and flags on people who just joined.
at least 10 of 50 stopped spamming, begging, promoting posts where its not allowed and became users i like to have on my feed, to track their progress and upvote them when they are good. most of new people i found this way, are limited by language barrier, so it requires lot of communication to fix it up, a lot of patience sometimes. when you put some effort to reach them, turns out most of newbie spammers are just ok people without clue how this platform works. and they are mostly willing to learn, listen and improve.

just as you said that whales should take care of dolphins, minnows should pay more attention to new users.

they are constant stream of fresh blood to steemit. ignoring them is the way to create constant stream of spam and begging (what we have atm).