Hey everyone, recently I've seen an influx of random posts and excerpts of poems being posted by accounts, most likely ran by bots, but possibly people posting garbage to abuse the system. I'm not sure how fast the system would catch on but we as a community need to focus on helping out! The most effective way to do so is to flag the offending posts so that they, with enough flags (which show as - votes in the list of votes which are usually all +), will lose all potential revenue from the post. That should be good enough for now until the users are banned somehow (how does that work in a decentralized way). To flag a post click the flag in the top right of the post.
With me saying we need to flag more posts on Steemit, I'd also like to say that we need to flag appropriately. Reddit upvotes are supposed to be used when the content is appropriate to the sub whether or not you like it. Downvotes are used for when content is not appropriate. Users of reddit use upvotes and downvotes for agreement with a post or comment which is different from it's original intention. I believe that on Steemit, upvotes should be used for content that you like (I guess you could disagree with the content but there's no relevance factor). Flagging should be reserved for content that is bad for Steemit as a whole, and this is even stated when you click the flag button. Content you disagree with does not deserve a flag and it does not deserve an upvote. You can just leave it alone and know they made no money off of you, but that you're not wrongly taking away their revenue.
There is flagging instead of downvotes for a reason! Wrongly flagging posts will steal away the revenue they earned from those who enjoyed their content. There are no downvotes in Steemit as you can just ignore any content that you don't appreciate.