Absolutely: Public awareness of wrong doing will get most of the abusers stop doing what they do.
I also agree with with ats-david that some things shall be brought back into the code, for instance the limit of 4 posts per day that has been removed. Without a limit a member can now publish 100 posts per day. I've seen users publishing every 15 minute a new posts! That is spam! But when they can get even 10ct per post and can automate the generation of the posts, then 100 post per day times 10ct is worth to abuse the system.
And why do we have the increase of vote power with a factor of 4? This makes our votes 4 times stronger and that makes the self voting on spam posts 4 times more rewarding, meaning it rewards starting to spam the system with at least 10 post per day and 100% self votes.
So, it'll be a combination of things, technology and humans to prevent abuse.
A post every 15 minutes is pretty ridiculous and unless they've got some kind of scheme for getting upvotes, I would think they'd lose interest and move on to something else pretty quickly, it'll probably be spammy comments though so, only a small improvement.
With that said, there are days when I think I could post 5 or 6 times in one day.
I am spending probably 8-10 hours a day here though.
Maybe a nice balance between 10&40 votes/day would help dilute the self voting, or at least make it not such a difficult decision for people to chose between? I'm lucky enough to have some time to grow organically (thanks to an understanding wife), but I can understand that there are a lot of people desperate to find a way out of their financial situations.
And desperate people tend to do desperate things.
That doesn't account for the greedy ones though.
Desperate people I do not like to be part of our community I must say, also the greedy ones.
Why do you think people will stop posting every 15 minutes? It is quite easy (not for me since I'm not a developer), to create a bot that takes your photo catalogue and start posting a couple of photos per post every lets say 15 minutes. Then go out in the street and recruit 20 new members, let them get an account on Steemit and also connect a bot to their accounts and at the same time let all these accounts vote for each other. Even if you can create 10 quality posts a day, why would you publish them every day? In the end no follower will like to see the same author that many times a day, even when the posts are damn good. I would even think 1 or 2 posts a day should be the maximum and that shall be enforced by the system. We had a maximum of 4 posts per day, but that limit is taken away completely.
For sure the increase of vote power has no purpose IMHO, and shall be rolled back for sure.
I'm not well versed on the use of bots. I grasp the concept but not having the money to dump into the system and spam my way to the top, I've more or less ignored them. I'd like to think that I wouldn't do that even if I did have the resources.
I'm intrigued by the chance to earn & keep the fruits of my own labor. I've watched other people reap the lion's share most of my adult life. Those people also determined what I would spend my hours, days, weeks and years working on. It may wear off at some point but sometimes I need to get things out of my head and onto a page so they're not swirling around in there. The noise keeps my wife awake.
And an upvote or a really good comment that sparks a discussion is still exciting for me.
I'm not sure how to keep the platform open enough to allow people to express themselves and still keep the quality high enough to sustain Steemit.
I think your post is a good start on the way to finding a workable solution though.
LOL
I dont think these things are related. Any opinion can be voiced in a quality way, and any discussion can be going in a quality way. I personally like the big differences of opinions members of the community have. In general, that is one of the key things why I like Steemit and want to take extra steps to make sure the community will survive. I can only learn from other opinions.
Me too.
And my wife has turned to me when we got into bed and said, "You're thinking about Steemit aren't you?"
I'm not sure if she can actually hear it or not, but she's been right every time.