Unfortunately, spam will always be ahead. That's the nature of an ever-escalating, human-backed architecture that profits by simply being and being in front of people.

(You can probably think of this in a better context by thinking about ecologies. You can never just have an ecology of plants that grow, live, and die. If energy is entering the system, you will get plants that parasitize other plans. Given long enough, you get animals that feed upon plants and which are, in turn, fed upon. An environment that lacks that dynamic is dying, leaking energy into entropy.)

In retrospect, that's kind of depressing.

I'm curious how much the "active engagement" requirements on Steemit are going to suppress how much of that spam actually ends up in front of someone. Making it cheap and easy to create an account doesn't necessarily mean that the content that account creates will get seen by people, or by many people. Unfortunately, this also is a pressure that works against new users getting into the community. After all, at the beginning, everyone is indistinguishable from a spam account.

I'm a new user, here, so I don't have an immense amount of understanding of how the dynamic works. I hope to gain one. We'll see how that goes.