It's a good point. But does it lead us down a road of censorship and is that a value that Steem wants to advocate?
I'm playing devils advocate of course. The intention of the platform is to reward good content and thus surface good content more efficiently. And for the majority of the time, that will work. However there will always be the few who find a way to make a dishonest buck and cause frustrations in the process.
So, there are bots. But much like banks and their systems, they don't always get it right. Well, neither do humans...Anyway. Maybe when a post is flagged, it could be reviewed by an elected team or perhaps it's offered to the Steem community to judge (to avoid the team being overloaded or slow), if the post deemed dishonourable in it's content or just straight up spam, then the payout value and the post is removed.
Perhaps even the judges could receive an equal portion of the payout value...!
Or it could go into a minnowbot.
Or a pot for new people to give them a larger starting incentive?!
And your comment is one of the reasons we are writing posts like this one. We really want to get the communities views on what is and isn't acceptable. When does the community the we are straying too far into content moderation?
That's actually why I came up with the idea of 'flag/downvote parties' after @stellabelle made a similar post to remove some bot net payouts. It gets the community involved in looking at the content and deciding for themselves whether or not it is spam.
So perhaps the solution is an extension of flagging/downvoting?
Happy to help where I can, although I’m pretty new so perhaps feedback from someone with a more experienced opinion would hold better weight.