Its largely self-moderated, which leads to unfortunate outcomes like bot-voting - for example, I've noticed @zer0hedge will cut-and-paste a story ripped from zerohedge.com, and within a minute or two he'll have 30+ upvotes.

There are other tricks too, like "sockpuppet" accounts, writing supporting comments or articles for other people, giving the illusion that they have a receptive user base. Or simply scamming the potential rewards through upvoting their own comments.

It is "wild west" to a degree, but sometimes major violations of community standards results in higher-level users getting together to downvote an abuser.

Welcome to Steem, The more steem you have the more voting power you get. 
That's the most novel aspect of steem.

So yeah it's a bit like the wild-west in some ways.