I don't think this is something that should be handled through authoritarian leadership, and I don't think this should be handled much differently from other kinds of spam/spammers, nor from other cases where witnesses are misbehaving in one way or another.
I wonder though, if with the use of bots some sort of leadership or monitoring is needed, new people keep coming to steemit and witness' keep conducting themselves this way, all be it seemingly the minority, for now, years down the line we possibly could have some serious issues with everything just being overrun in that way. It's almost like the annoying you tube ad's, which now are on everything, sometimes you can't skip past them, some of them are ridiculously long, and now i even see back to back adverts. It wasn't enough of a big deal before to give it much attention, now it really does grind on me and i am pulling away from it massively. It's not the same i know, but look how that's grown over the years into something highly annoying.
I don't really know enough about all of this to say anything concrete, however my self being less than a month old on Steemit can see it's going on and can see people speaking up about it, not just here, especially minnows.
It may go against the original idea for steemit, but it's not just people on here, there are bots being utilised, and does that need some rules around it? Nothing is stagnant, and if they hold their feet firm in the ground sticking with the original ideas when there are so many rumblings going on with the users about this issue, if they don't want to be fluid and move or grow with the users, then it could become a free for all for the 'bot's and above example, and ultimately people could start walking away, the platform will kill it self.
I speak this way only as a potential, i am not saying this is what i think is going to happen.
At least you can pay $15 a month to get rid of the ads on YouTube...
(Though were we able to pay to block the spam here, I’d most likely definitely be on my way out.)