Maybe this idea will find some traction with you folks....
Allow users to toggle on a feature that would present a CAPCHA when they went to upvote. Such non-spammer/non-bot upvotes would be run through the n^2 calculation for reward payout and all non-CAPCHA treated as n ().
Such an approach may depreciate two deviant activities in one swoop.
It would work on Steemit, but Steemit is just a frontend to access the STEEM blockchain.
So I'm afraid it wouldn't do much good.
Thanks for the clarification. Back to.the drawing board. 😎