The second insight is that of Curation Teams. You share a gripe with us all that spammers are able to abuse the system with the right amount of money, and simply upvote something purely on the basis that it will give them some return.
Curation teams are groups of people who manually curate quality content depending on their focus: @steemSTEM (of which I am a manager) focuses on promoting science. tech, engineering and math). @steemiteducation is of course, educational. @ocd promotes undervalued posts from newer, struggling users, and @curie is kind of the big mother of curation that spreads its wealth across multiple communities. There are many more out there.
The more these teams grow and are funded, the more high quality posts are pushed up with value, and the spam is pushed down - something I believe is absolutely vital to this platform. Users who believe in any given team can partake by following a trail of votes; whenever we upvote something valuable, 40 other accounts automatically follow, in the trust that we do a good job (everything is public so it's hard to get away with abuse in this case).
The more we support these teams, the the better the site will be as more people strive to meet our quality requirements rather than try to sneak some of those rewards with thoughtless upvotes