Well as much as I share your skepticism for the upcoming updates. They have been promised since before Korea had nukes after all. If, and I'm saying If we implement Hive/Communities we could do something of the sort.
Accounts could be labeled Spammy Spammers and the community could render them inert. Meaning, they could post, but not make any money. Which is both cool and scary.
Cool and scary, yeah. I agree, but I also think it's necessary to actually punish spammers in some way so they learn. I probably get 2-3 messages on Discord each day, and all of them are from upvote-beggars.
I hate it. I tried, for a very, very long time, to reason with these people. To tell them how to behave and approach Steemit. I did everything I could to help them. To teach them... And it was all for nothing.
Nowadays, I ignore most of my messages, but that means that I'll actually miss out on something good or genuine too occasionally.
However, now I'm talking more about off-Steemit than on-Steemit. The spammy comments I get on my articles are boring and annoying too obviously, but I don't get as many comments nowadays as I got a few months back, so I'm okay with them.. Well, I don't have any problems to just ignore them.