This is starting to drive me a little crazy...
There are flagging wars, bidding bots, spam comments...
And the most common proposed solution is "Steem needs to fix this."
Steem needs to block spam comments
Only Steem can do a prepaid card to spend your SBD or STEEM
Steem needs to disallow flagging posts other than spam/plagiarism
Steem needs to ______
I'm only going to say this... a million more times, actually, until the netizens of Steem figure out they need to think differently to benefit from this social media revolution.
STEEM is a cryptocurrency. It's on an OPEN blockchain (Steem)
Steemit is a corporation that is heavily invested in Steem (and STEEM) and has the most influence on its development.
MSPSteem is a clone of Steemit.
eSteem is an app (developed by Steemit? I don't know)
Utopian.io is a completely separate web-site that provides access to Steem.
I think there's even a special browser you can get that only accesses Steem. I haven't used it yet.
There are completely independent apps you can use to access Steem.
There are third-party web-sites that provide services around Steem.
There are SMT startups that will create tokens and only show posts from authors that already have valid tokens. (Pay-to-post or pre-screened content providers).
You could even create an author-friendly Steem portal (web-site) where 
What they have is influence. A lot of it, actually. Steemit could block spam, require checks against plagiarism, provide promotion, etc. Utopian.io already does something like this by only showing articles that use their hashtag.
...all the other things we hate about Steem will still be there because Steem is an OPEN blockchain. Anybody can spin up a node, populate a peer list (witnesses) and publish whatever damn thing they want to Steem, as long as it does not violate the Steem protocol.
I could create a bot that sends 0.001 SBD messages to EVERY SINGLE ACTIVE USER with 'your mom' jokes. Steemit could block my account and I could find another way to keep it up, until I ran out of SBD, ran out of money to buy more, and had no further outlet but to complain on Steem about living in a soaking cardboard box because I spent all my money enlightening Steemians with heartfelt 'your mom' jokes. It could happen, but it probably won't... (don't tempt me...)
Steemit can't stop me. They could hide 0.001 transactions from appearing in your wallet. Or make it a user setting. And you could still see those transactions on steemd or steemworld or SteemSQL or any other third-party app that lets you see your wallet. (You can't hide spam transactions from me!) The only way to stop spam transactions would be to change the protocol.
The protocol is what is agreed on by the witnesses... the rules that determine what is allowed and disallowed... the thing that requires a hard fork to change.
So yes, we could block plagiarism, block spam comments, block three word comment (upvote for upvote) etc... but it would require a change to the protocol. A hard fork. It's not something Steemit can fix. And it's definitely not something Steem can fix, because Steem is not an autonomous entity. It's a blockchain!!
Now, Steemit can make certain things harder to do by censoring the activities it will forward to the blockchain. And the people that do those will find other ways to access the blockchain. That's why the protocol already has mechanisms built in for dealing with everything we hate about Steem. You don't like spam comments? Great! Downvote them until they give up. You don't like plagiarism? great! downvote, support those that have tools, etc. (
You don't like flagging wars and people that use downvotes instead of upvotes? You think
That's called freedom and it makes Steem what it is. The only way to change that would be to change the protocol. To hard fork.
You could hard fork to remove the ability to downvote, but then how would you flag spam and plagiarism? There is only one way to remove downvotes and still be able to flag spam, plagiarism, NSFW posts without proper tagging...
And that would be to have a central entity with the power to reverse downvotes. Removing flagging wars will turn Steem into Facebook, because the ONLY way to accomplish that is to hard-fork away from a distributed blockchain to centralized censorship.
That will NEVER happen because it is completely opposed to everything that makes Steem amazing. You can have my blockchain freedom when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. This genie has escaped the bottle. Like bitcoin, the only way to stop it is to shut down every node. Every witness.
...without completely destroying civilization. You can hate what I have to say, you can downvote me into oblivion, you can pummel every unrewarded post and cost me every penny I spent on promotion in the last 7 days, but it won't change the truth.
You don't want to play in reality's sandbox? Go back into the matrix, plug-in, and jack out. Forget you heard about crypto, forget about freedom, forget about unrestricted opportunity, forget about censorship-proof social media.
Go back to Facebook where you can upvote cat videos with impunity and have a central censorship authority to appeal to when some deranged individual flags your wedding photos as inappropriate content (yes, I've seen that happen).
At least here when somebody wields an upvote that others disagree with, you can appeal to the community and their amassed upvotes can overcome the downvote that originally smacked your whiny ass off the front page.
This article is immutable. It happened. You can't un-happen it. Peace
