I think the 7 day limit on being relevant and rewarded actually encourages a quick and rushed quantity of mediocre articles as opposed to fewer high quality articles. If new votes, even after a year, would also bring new rewards, then in the end, actual good posts, and concequently good authors, would float to the surface.

I am so grateful for people like you and systems like @spaminator, @steemcleaners for working so hard making this platform a safer and better place and I really appreciate it.
You definitely will have my support and my vote.
Thank you @drakos

Although I too hate spam, I am not sure blocking users is the way to go.  I agree that Steemit was built on full transparency and non-censorship because all postings are forever "available" on the blockchain.  But, there is still a great deal of censorship taking place on the visible layer.  

Flagging is just one such vehicle.  Although it does not completely remove a user or their post from the visible layer and certainly doesn't from the blockchain itself, it does put them in a state, if enough flags are received to make it less obvious they are there to most users.  I do consider that censorship.  

The biggest type of censorship is censorship via bullying.  I see that all the time on steemit.  I would say that 90% of the time I agree with what is happening but again, it is censorship.  

I am not sure there can be a truly top layer censor-free steemit.  I am not sure what that would look like.  I do understand that whatever is written is on the blockchain and will be on the record forever but how many people do you know that are going out looking at the individual records for each post ever made.  Very few.  

I wish there was someone more akin to Basic Attention Token (BAT), where I can setup my settings to allow for spam and other types of advertisements based on a certain reward that I would receive from the publishers of such spam and advertisements.  Publishers pay for my attention to their content.  I think that is a more effective way to deal with it.  Anyway, just my thoughts.

Who would decide who gets rejected? And how do you protect against malicious use of tools that are designed to prevent spam? There seem to be lots of negative issues on steemit arising from its economic model and rules around voting and rewards, but from what I've read it may also be very difficult to find a way to change the rules to get the desired outcomes. And that is assuming that everyone even agrees on those outcomes (which is highly unlikely). I keep of Hayek's view that "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Perhaps one approach is take a kind of Nasim Taleb approach to minimizing overall risk by spawning sub-steemits that experiment with different rules. This is happening in some sense already with organically organized groups on steemit, however those groups are limited because they cannot change the fundamental rules.

>reject any transaction from a blocked account 

I'm afraid this would totally go against the "zero cenceorship" slogan from Steemit.

Thank you for sharing of this information! 
 I would be happy if you could take a look at your my latest drawing:)

TLRD

>  Steem code to literally reject any transaction from a blocked account by the user.

What does it mean? No clue.

Any system that provides you monetary value for content will ALWAYS have spam. Simply dont vote for it as soon as you start voting for it on your comments etc you encourage it to happen more.

We all need to start voting on real quality content and only that. However that wont ever happen. It is just one of those pitfalls with really no solution other then you control what you vote on your posts you have that control.

TBH (to be honest)...

Steemit can "hide" spam and abuse from being viewed.  It cannot stop it from occurring or polluting the blockchain.

No more than Microsoft Hotmail or Outlook 365 can stop spam or abuse. It can only try to hide it from appearing in people's inboxes.

Spam and abuse will be prevalent on the blockchain because there is no way to code human ingenuity and greed from abusing things.

>each user can select who they want to block and create their own blacklist. It's that simple

Unfortunately, not that simple.  Let's say you have 100,000 users.  Each user has 1,000 people on their blacklist.  (which is quite small considering the number of spammy new accounts that can exist)

Now that becomes 1 million blacklisted user accounts for 100,000 users.  At some point, the lag and resources needed to handle all the blacklists start to become a bottleneck for the 3 second blockchain timing to show new posts.

It's not scalable to create blacklists for each user, miles long.

You have the right idea.  It's just not feasible.

We should have a reputation system based on how many users have muted that other user. This will require oracles and 1 person = 1 vote, but would in my opinion counter a lot of the spam on the chain.

That's a great idea! I would personally love to see this on steemit and I think it's high time something like this is introduced.

How to:
1. Delete all spam
2. Eliminate abusive preminers (for those not counting premining itself as abuse) and their perpetuated effects
3. Get rid of the stranglehold of incompetent (at best) management and replace the dysfunctional steemit interface and infrastructure.

?

Start a different blockchain where only witnesses that have full nodes are rewarded, replace the FB based software with something that is scrollable, and integrate a functional javascript-free blockchain explorer in the interface. 
New joiners are granted an equal amount of the currency to start to play with, similar, but not necessarily identical to how it was done here.

Where there are humans, there will always be human behavior. Steemit is no different unfortunately but I agree with you that it has the potential to change and stand out. "It can not be done" is a false statement, yes it can, it just needs the will to be done. 

Memos in our wallets and those follow, unfollow junkies who hit those buttons a million times per minute just to get your attention would be history. 

The system does allow it and sometimes I ask myself WHY. Is it because it can not be fixed? Nope. People are programming robots to walk, talk and dance. Rejecting any transaction from a blocked account seems simple when compared to that. Is it because people do not want to fix it for any reason? I would bet on this one. Wheater it is the lack of will, interest or just plain support for the spam behavior, when there will be people who can fix it and want to fix it, it will be fixed.

No censorship comes with a price. Its just the way it is. I mean realistically  of we were to be honest steemit is already too big if you want quality content. I believe steemit wants to go the social media route and that comes with spam. Otherwise the top investors/whales can leave and only people who want quality content will stay. Steemit would then become niche and I am sure many would be unhappy with the lower price and volume of steem.

...just voted witness for you, I love pirates!
And thanks for your feedback on my work.

For a moment i have been thinking about that also, if this issue isn't traeted appropriately it will scare aware investors and thereby turn the community into a joke. Resteeming right away!

Yes, spam is fundamental issue of this platform and its nothing related to platform we just need some more upgradation of options as you said Blocking System and if it gets introduced then implementation of actions can be done through individual, this means, if people receive any spammy comment they can take the real time action and this way they will not allow that particular spammer in their account and this way we can see clean section of comments.

I've spent 8 months on this platform and as per my analysis every comment which reflects as spam possibly the user is not spammer, they are just holding wrong ideology towards the platform or some lack of communication so it's not mandatory but in my opinion if we see any spam comments let's reply with some guidance or write them as how Steemit works and what actions they should do, this may sound waste of time and energy but who knows possibly that spammer can turn into effective blogger. I am saying this with experience because when I've joined Steemit Platform initially people considered my work as spam and one day i received the guiding comment from that point of time I've changed my work and became professional in my work. It's an collective action to make Steemit Platform productive.

Thanks for sharing this post with us and wishing you an great day. Stay blessed. 🙂

being able to make a blacklist for spam is a good idea.

I am new here but can see that it is very difficult. Many spammers and abusers out of control 😑

Fighting spam is everyone's job, that annoys me too, and it is incredible that there are people who agree with spam, do not know the damage that cause the platform I think it is best to do educational campaigns to combat spam and report those abuses

AHAHAH I'm such an idiot that when I saw the "camon do something about the abuse" picture, at the beginning I thought it was a big penis and I got excited.
LOL
https://media.giphy.com/media/l0Ex4RcUX6YsCvMT6/giphy.gif

@steemflagrewards is another initiative to help addressing the overwhelming abuse on this platform. We are community driven and community powered; however, our current level of delegation allows for up to $0.1 ish STU upvote bounties on abuse flagged. Often we notice voting abuse exceeding $10 which requires coordinated flag campaigns.

As for the code level solution, I had been thinking about something of a signature based packet filtering software or device for witnesses. The question is what kind of overhead would this require on already taxed witness servers. 

Rejecting transactions from known blacklist users is a good start but perhaps I there were a means to analyze patterns in these transactions would be a step up considering these abusers will often pick up operations on a new account. Rinse and repeat. Etc.

This is one of the reasons why I'm not telling my underage sister to join even though her art and crafts are really incredible. Much better work than my stuff was when I was 18. However her confidence is still a bit fragile and Steemit is very rough for new Steemians. So it's simply not worth the risk. I wonder how many shy artists chose to not join or left, because of abuse or ignorance on Steemit.