I would hope Steemit can at least spot new accounts that just differ by a number. That should be trivial to check. Streamlining sign-up has to be a priority, but it's not easy to deal with abuse.

I have 2 friends who signed up on March 1st and still haven't gotten their final signup email.

This assumes people would be _more_ willing to vote on comments after the change.
I've been upvoting comments under my posts almost since the day I joined, which means my initial votes were way below the threshold. It's not a problem anymore now, obviously, but the change would force me to use a lot more VP if I want to guarantee that a comment I appreciate gets _anything_ for it. I rarely see more than 1 or 2 people upvoting a comment. If not at least one of the is a dolphin or voting with 100%, there will be no payout and people have wasted their VP.

I get where you're coming from with your proposal. But imo, it would accelerate the death of this platform. Spammers have to be dealt with (I flag them under my posts all the time), but not at the cost of hurting minnows.

I wish I knew.   For the longest time I felt the solution was strong spam prevention like SteemCleaners with more man power and reward reversal with fewer strings attached to what they can deal with.   Make it unprofitable and they will stop. 

But there are so many people playing the game it’s a cat and mouse game in the end.  

There are a few ideas that might help and likely won’t be just one solution.  

* dual voting pools so you can flag without sacrificing rewards
* anonymous flagging
* higher dust level for comments
* community SteemCleaners like service

I still feel a big part of the solution is to make their efforts negative ROI which will discourage the practice.  As a very active spam fighter, finding and identifying (importantly verifying) is extremely time consuming and unrewarding.

I very actively blacklist users so they cannot use my promotion services to reward their garbage but most of the stuff I find and identify I feel will never be dealt with.

@steemcleaners burn the accounts and the SBD/Steem they hold ;)

Now that is a REALLY good idea! Yes that would solve the problem I outlined. The only problem left would be: How to set the right threshold in order for the minnows not to get dis-incentivized because they have to wait so long for their payment.

Yeah, this is a better proposal here!

Actually, I have included this idea in my comment above, it was a pretty good one!

That might work, if earnings were placed in savings to be collected, if they stick around 90 days or whatever and are proven to not be a spammer...

Who is telling them? It's up to the whales if Steemit survives. They can go for the short time win or help the platform thrive.

Yes you are right, *should not* but sometimes it actually really does take a while to even be having that as a new user, to be honest

@timcliff "People that are actually contributing things of value should not have a difficult time of earning 0.25 on a post/comment. " Yes, should not.

Look, you are a highly active whale who obviously supports commenters regularly and also your readers upvote each other too, and still barely anyone could earn anything in this comment section after the change. If you as a top whale, who is in the top ~0.1% of all Steemit users(based on SP), would have a hard time avoiding a bunch of rounded down rewards, then what would the 99.9% do? :)

Since this is a new article and we could say it's because of that, I checked an older post. Literally, no one was above 0.25. All of their rewards would be rounded down to 0. That's why I said it would be nearly impossible for the majority to earn anything. That wouldn't be something that could we label as decentralized. Giving power to only a few people to control most of the wealth is what we try to avoid here(not the case but still).

(p.s. Comment upvote bot owners would make a bank too because people would pay big money to get the rewards on their comments up to the minimum. Let's say 0.25 is the minimum, 0.05 is on the comment, so you pay for a 0.21 vote in order to avoid a rounded down reward.  -> Yet again, money pouring to a few people/companies -> Less decentralized outcome. -> Random comments stay but from that point, not only the posts but the comments will be massively bot manipulated too. )

@tarazkp Yes, probably people would gravitate towards a place where they could have better outcome. So whales(or vote for vote communities). Like, the top few dozens. Since only they could give an upvote that would not be rounded down. To reward your followers without the help(votes) of others, at the moment you would need a few thousands of SP at least. In case if you have lots of regulars, then you need a lot more. Also, if you would like to calibrate the voting weight too in order to customize rewards based on the quality of comments or would like to spread votes among more people, you would need even more. Minimum tens of thousands or even 100k+. Not much people/communities have that amount.

Your theory seems sound, but it doesn't take into account niches. For example, my area is gardening and homesteading and the only account on here for that interest who might be able to give a comment a vote of that value is @papa-pepper. As you can imagine, he is only one account, so although I've conversed with him I've never had an upvote from him. He prioritises the people he can also work with offline, as he should, because that is what homesteading is about. 

Okay, I'm willing to concede that increasing the comment payout might sort out the wheat from the chaff, but I've been here a while and my full upvote is still not at that level.  After all the work I've put in to trying to increase my SP I'd be really disappointed not to be able to reward an amazing comment with a payout worthy vote. I've only recently discovered that I need to get it to 0.02 or more to even net them a payout, so I've been increasing my votes or not upvoting at all.

With way less users to get noticed..
It was a small puddle on year ago. 
These days it is a sea to fight against. 
Way harder to get noticed. And those little payout are good motivation bursts. To not go back to Facebook or other platforms

It took me 3-4 months just to have enough SBD to be able to give myself any reward, and my SP alone is still not enough for it, and no, I will keep powering down as fast as I can.

Please take a look in this comment section and see how many comments did get 10 upvote or more. And here a lot of wintered stemians are discussing not a lot of newbies.
Take a look at blogs from red fish or plankton and see how many comments or view they are getting. I really don't find it realistic from a beginners viewpoint.
I did this comment of you multiple times. Do you remember how hard it was to get ten upvote to a post? Let alone a comment!