Minnows should stay well clear of this war - we haven't any power and will just get crushed in the process. Leave it to the whales.
In the meanwhile, if you see someone who doesn't deserve it getting votes, don't flag them, instead upvote someone else. The amount of steem distributed in a 24 hour period is fixed, so your upvote for someone else has the same effect as flagging the bad guys in that it redistributes the steem. And this way you won't be at risk of being flagged yourself and will make the day of the noob you have upvoted!
It doesn't have the same effect. A $0.10 upvote for someone else won't take $0.10 away from haejin.
It does have the same effect. The pool of steem is fixed. So a $0.10 flag on haegin's post has the same effect as a $0.10 upvote for someone else. So don't bother flagging, just upvote someone else.
That's not correct. If I flag haejin (or anybody else) his rewards are directly reduced by the exact amount of my vote's worth.
Upvoting someone else rewards that person at the expense of everybody else. Downvoting someone rewards everybody else at the expense of that single individual.
Proof: When @thing-2 upvoted you, haejin's rewards remained the same...because the .25 was spread across all current claimants on Steem for the day. If it were a downvote for haejin, haejin's rewards would be .25 less.
Thank you.
Here's another way to put it:
A downvote means that I believe the rest of the community should have a greater say in reward pool distribution than than the user who upvoted haejin. This is my basic rationale for why I flag him. He is mindlessly and indiscriminately upvoted by a single individual who has never given any reason for doing so. It is my belief that Steemians as a whole show better discretion than that guy and therefore should be allotted a greater weight when it comes to reward pool distribution.