I hadn't read the papers but just started doing so. Its funny, how everything sounds so well-devised, and then you show up here and its like Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome.

This is a perfect analogy! Don't forget that steemit is still in its beta but I completely understand where you are coming from.

Obviously, it is a system that can be taken over, but with what effort? You would need to be able to accumulate power faster than the bots. You would need to be able to squash the efforts of the whales.

You could also do this by being a witness, I mean it is still unlikely but if you could get in the top 20 then you would basically have a say in what happens in steemit (to the point where you can change the blockchain sourcecode) but I mean then looking at the top 20 witnesses its not hard to realize that most of them offer a vote selling service.

If we could get the Hive account@steemit account (and Hive account@ned and Hive account@dan) to help fight the abuse then we wouldn't have issues but then someone might say thats something that could cause a spark and many complaints. As you pointed out, it would be difficult to change the place by onesself but a group on the other hand might have a chance.