I don't really blame them, but I do think the only way to fix it is through hardcoding stricter rules, or adding some kind of new mechanic. Self-policing through downvoting leads to nothing but financial warfare and I think that it's only going to get worse as time progresses. And it's not efficient in stopping anyone from doing anything.. As long as certain loopholes exist, there's always going to be people trying to abuse it. The bigger Steemit gets, the worse it becomes. It's easy to have order in a relatively small community, but keeping order in a global community is next to impossible unless you rule with an iron fist.

I do think that solutions can be coded in though, depending on the issue. These could be anything from removing the ability to downvote/selfvote, to instating a whole new class of Witnesses with moderator rights (Steemit police?) which are voted in. But without dev intervention, the only thing that 'we' can do is to have a handful of helpful whales spend all their time downvoting abusers. And with the amount of abusers increasing and the amount of helpful whales not increasing I don't see how this can be improved without implementing better tools for moderation.