The failure of the analogy with lions and gazelles is that lions have no opportunities when gazelles are gone. The @whales do. Short term profit should not be a novel concept. It drives the corporate world.
There is potential, in Steemit, to not only kill Steemit for profit, but to 'poison the well' in a world where significant propaganda, surveillance, and repression of speech is ongoing, and perhaps increasing to an intolerable level.
I hope these considerations are undertaken soon, in order to preclude such things from affecting Steemit undesirably.
The whales don't really have alternatives when the resources run out whether we speak about normal folk or gazelles. They ecosystem collapses. Remember ENRON? Leehman Brothers?
I haven't seen repression of speech here and the only surveillance is in regards to copyrighted material.
You could make suggestions in a post if you feel that there are such occurrences.