RE: The cost of being an abuser on Steem
it is much harder for people to buy a reputation
Yes, but I'm saying it's been too long of a period of vote-trading and buying that the majority of reputation of users is not based on actual genuine curation for it to matter anymore. It would just be way better to reset or strike it altogether now before the masses start coming in. Your solutions to the problems seem to be with the reputation existing in mind hence I want to point out that removing it completely would be way better. I doubt there's many curators or curation projects that are relying on the reputation score to curate, if they do it's also wrong as it should be about the content mainly and then about the users, their actual reputation on the chain and what they do for Steem etc on the side.
It's the same problem with Haejin, he's not commenting anymore nor posting so we can't bring down his reputation nor is there another account except for steemsports I think that has a higher rep to affect it properly and the cost is immense to bring it down even with the free downvotes it will take ages.
It is a problem, no doubt about that. A total removal, and the ability of small accounts to effect larger accounts is going to be a very hard sell, I can see where doing away with it would be a good thing, Perhaps we as a community need to come together and decide if there really needs to be a Social Credit Score type thing for the steem block chain. No SCS could be a selling point to many that do not favor the appearance of one person is better than another based on a superficial scoring system.