Any deliberate bullying without due course of discussions should be countered. One way for that would be to create an account that could counter such attacks and all sensible people can delegate some SP to this account so that the greater interests of the platform are maintained.
However one good thing amongst all these hoopla is that people recognise Steem as value and a source generating income and hence all these attempts at gaming the system. When there are ways to make money power play comes into fore and it is the same case with Steem as well. But let us hope that with governance built into blockchain it can be better handled on Steem than in the real world.
Whether Steem whales will consider the long term prospects of the platform and hence their own or will they think short term will decide the fate of the platform itself in my opinion.
Do you mean gaming the system as in posting multiple comments in response to a post, self-voting them to 100% without even upvoting the original post.
Yeh, that sort of gaming the system really sucks eh. It's rife.