I (and thus @cheetah) don't have anywhere near enough influence to combat this stuff alone. I'm just a normal community member like any other, there are no special privileges on the blockchain.
Cheetah is mostly an alert bot, check out the FAQ if you haven't yet!
Interesting side note -- cheetah only performs 1% votes, yet she sits at less than 50% voting power constantly. Nuts!
I'd bet we could get a lot of volunteers to manually hunt down and downvote abuses of the system. Is there a way we could be set up anonymously as a proxy 1 day per week? Just set up anonymous accounts and delegate enough SP to do downvote damage. I would help out with that. I use my own account now to flag, but a separate proxy account (setup by steemit?) would help. I could max downvote for one day, and let the account build back up the rest of the week. If you get a hundred people willing to downvote abuses for one day per week with delegated SP, we might make a dent.
That is quite interesting, but honestly, i'm not too shocked.
Scrolling the "New" tab would reveal the massive amount of spam-