Honestly, I don't like being cynical... and I have lots of faith and hopes in Steemit I just have less in humanity, in the broader sense.
My wife is (among other things) a very accomplished and experienced life coach and counselor and one of the things she's always passing along to her clients is that optimism and faith are awesome characteristics, as long as we don't use them as "blinders" to shield us from a reality that might harm us.
So if we were to give the spammers a chance... let's look at their motivation and experience. First thing that comes to my mind is that their approach is rooted in short term thinking. They care about "how do I get 5 cents NOW?" That's not surprising, because most "make money online" schemes run for a few months, pay out a little... and then go bankrupt. So we have to convey a "long term" approach to them as a better solution...
Part two (and I'm grossly generalizing here), many of our newcomers come from nations/cultural backgrounds where "cheating the system" is an inherent part of the culture. Not because they are "bad people" but because they were raised with and live with corrupt governments. Those in charge make unreasonable rules and demands, so you "cheat" to get ahead; to survive. Here in the west that might make us "pretty criminals;" elsewhere it's simply "a way of life" (I lived in Africa as a kid)
But now we have Steemit... which is a GLOBAL community... which cultural rule set do we build our foundation around? And HOW do we do that? @ned and @dan had a great vision for Steemit, but they were undeniably not born and grew up in Viet-Nam or Bangladesh.
So that leaves us with "education" at a very fundamental level. This sort of gives me an idea for a post... but whether enough eyeballs would see it is a whole other ball of wax.
Thanks for the conversation @son-of-satire.