The users must be the moderators of steemit. We all have personal responsibility to flag spam and abuse. If you regulate too hard you will start inadvertently punishing people who are not abusers of the system.
Users must be taught when joining steemit that THEY are the moderators, and THEY are responsible for flagging content that does not belong on the platform. It is then up to seasoned and experienced members to analyze the flagged accounts for further abuse and set up automated systems which help prevent spam.
I think we will probably have to abandon the idea of being able to auto-ban spammers with intelligent algorythms because that could cause accidental censorship of legitimate users. We must view every individual user as EQUALLY important as the entire body of users. If even one user is ostracized due to a miscalculated automation algorythm then we are doing it wrong.
It is up to the programmers to implement these ideas on behalf of the community, and of course they should be rewarded for their time.
Perhaps play a short and entertaining video to each new user explaining to them that just like any other social network, there is spam, haters, flamers, jerks and quality posters, and tell them if they catch someone spamming on their page they have a duty to go check their comments section and see if they have been spamming on everyone elses page! That way they can flag each spam post.
However, this is not an ideal method in my opinion. It shouldn't be hard to detect when a user is posting the exact same message over and over again on hundreds of posts, and you should be able to flag USERS not just posts, that way they can have their accounts analyzed by the community. Everyone should be able to take a moderator role and be rewarded for the time they spend sifting through posts and flagging spam, because as it currently stands, we receive no rewards for the time we spend moderating steemit.
All human psychology is based on risk and reward. Human beings will not waste their time moderating steemit if they do not perceive some sort of value as a result of their hard work, and I'm sorry but "making steemit better" isn't going to motivate everyone.
Simply reward users for flagging spam.
How? By waiting until a post or a user has been flagged over 100 times then rewarding every user who contributed to that flag and deleting the post and flagging the user as a potential spammer. After 3 account flags, your account enters group moderation and anyone who wants to spend the time investigating the account can do so and put forth a vote on whether or not the user should be banned on the platform. After 100 votes to ban a user, they are banned.
How do we prevent this banning system from being abused? After all people could just flag things they don't like?
If you flag something to be banned and after 3 months it has not received enough votes to result in a ban, it is escalated to high priority and users are rewarded even more for voting on it. If after 1 more month the user does not receive enough votes to end in a ban, all users who flagged them receive a flag on their account as potential abusers. After 3 flags, THEY enter the moderation system and the process continues.
What do you guys think of these ideas? Please upvote if you think this would be useful to the developers, as I cannot code these ideas myself.