Hit the nail on the head again, the biggest, #1, by far problem here is spam accounts, people having thousands of them. Why not ad a captcha type system to have some level of proof of humanity. Hive account@abh12345 does an interaction league every week and his data and similar data is a great start to real interaction. Although based on his preferences at how he would like to see steemians interact, it provides a great deal of accuracy in how much people are on steemit, leaving legit comments, doing legit posts, interacting on other posts. To find a suitable algorithm to not take away an account but to cripple it if it meets certain parameters of looking and talking like a robot. I would be offended if I were put on that list, but I would surely prove my humanity very quickly to those that headed up the operation. Pretty hard to write 10,000 genuine reply letters for you account being crippled/cut in reputation, or whatever the method to fix this problem that is out of control here on the platform. Ask the byteball people if we have a spam account problem, they could likely give you a pretty educated guess on that already.

https://steemit.com/funny/@cartman/my-reaction-to-the-byteballs-steem-air-drop#@cryptkeeper17/re-cartman-my-reaction-to-the-byteballs-steem-air-drop-20180718t023455593z