I love the idea. For now you can follow and mute the person. Haven't tried it so not sure how that feature works.
Surely we can find a way to penalize the abusers. But they will always find a new way. Make a new account or whatever.
Best thing we can do is stick together as a community and ignore these people. Not only through not upvoting and sharing their garbage content but also flag them and spread the word to fellow steemians when you see such posts so we can all flag them if we feel they are abusing the system.
So not sure we need new rules, we need to do better as a community in disrupting their income and they will stop or lose money.
Great post and thoughts. Im not a developer so cant help other than lending opinions.
I hope we can find a resolution to this problem as well. Thanks for posting!!