Thanks. We fight all abuse equally, irrespective of the size of the account. The general idea that we fight small stakeholders is because the largest abuse operators regularly remove most of their acquired rewards/stake and split what they have across hundreds if not thousands of accounts. So we always end up with this visual representation of a small account when in reality if you add them up you end up with a fairly large stake in many cases. For part of the abuse fighting we 'borrow' large accounts that aren't fully using their downvotes in order to be able to restore the funds back to the reward pool.
Downvotes are intended because the final evaluation of content is meant to be a combination of up and down curation. In this case I'm not writing anything that's intended to offend anyone (although it might) but I know for a fact there's an account that throws a tiny downvote on most things I post. I can respect that person's decision to curate how they see fit.
.. why should the bees within a hive fight against each other (for example because of different opinions) instead to use their stings to defend the hive together against their enemies? :)
That's the great thing about Hive; there is no single definition of an enemy because we are decentralized. What I see as an enemy won't be what you see as one and neither of those will be what whomever reads our comments will see. All we can do is convey our vision through documentation and other means and leverage collaboration to arrive at some semblance of cohesion within decentralization.
I agree with you on most points.
Sure. I know about the idea of the 'redistribution' of the rewards pool. In general I am fine with flags (actually, I think the option to flag is essential).
I wouldn't complain if someone flagged some of my posts in case he thinks they were 'overvalued'. However, if a whale selects a certain user to flag every single of his/her posts due to personal animosities without even reading them, then I don't think that helps to improve the platform but only keeps off people from using HIVE.
Concerning the argument of possible 'counter flags' of the community:
If someone would constantly downvote you or me, maybe (maybe!) some stakeholders started to counter these flags, but if any newbie is affected, most of the time nobody notices/cares about that - and if then he complains loudly in public, he will get the explanation that that's blockchain/HIVE ("Don't whine, it's just the redistribution of the rewards pool, nothing personal!"). Whale flags and comments are never ever meant personal, you know. :-)