Asking users to disclose personal mobile phone numbers while also at the same time denying access to those who don't have mobile phone subscriptions is in itself both abusive to end-user security and elitist. Not to mention the inequality that manifests when some states force mobile phone registration on their users and others do not.
This extreme hack (comparable to using a machine gun to kill a chicken) is motivated by a desire to easily control abusers, which implies that the whole system is inherently flawed-- flawed by the fact that useful content is cannot be separated from drivel by the rating system as it was designed.
It's also somewhat shocking that steemit does not recognize the important role anonymity plays with speech freedom that's critical to having a nanny-free community. This new direction makes steemit.com unsuitable for whistle-blowers and civil rights activists. Perhaps it was never intended as such, but it's a pity to see a good tool get downgraded to Facebook-quality blogging.
Selecting users who are not street-wise (and thus willing to connect personal info to their account) has the side-effect reducing the quality of posts to that of the intelligence of that crowd.
You can buy and account with anonymous tokens or you can mine an account.
If you want a free handout of $5 worth of Steem Power then expect some protections. Also, for security purposes (hacked account recovery) a means of communicating is necessary. For 99% of people this system works.
It's good to have the advanced user options you mention, but they sound cumbersome and impractical. Hundreds of thousands of participants are being forced into a position of having th buy their freedom in order to make the spam-fight a little more convenient for a few admins, no?
Some questions:
The current model effectively encourages users to trade their privacy for time or money. That's also a problem because it victimizes the naïve -- those unaware of the compromise they're making, and those who won't discover they need privacy until it's too late and the information disclosure is used against them.
Seems like it might be worth just charging the $5 for the account creation. If blocking the spammers makes it that much harder for new users to get in it's hardly worth it.
$5 is extortionate. That's a weeks wage in some parts of the world.
A moderate user (say 1 or 2 blogs/week) needs ~5-10 accounts just to get a basic level of anonymous identity division (thus upwards of $25). Not to mention the time and effort of getting the right form of anonymous money. This overkill is being imposed on hundreds of thousands of users for the convenience of a few admins.
It's not worth it. The high price in time and money has made the system inadequate for anonymous blogging. Users will pay the price in freedom instead.