Yep. As users choose more and more to ignore spam comments, and downvote them when necessary, the spammers will end up simply recycling Steem amongst themselves.

As you said, the rep scores also take a hit when small accounts are flagged. I just had "sexy girl" leave a spam post on my blog in the comments section. I downvoted the post and their rep score is now not so sexy at all, dropping from 25 to 15 with one flag.

I never thought about folks making enough to basically live on in impoverished countries via spam comments. This is really sad. This platform could help people like this in other ways, and so much more effectively if used in a non-abusive fashion.

Upvoting spam comments out of pity would only serve make the platform less and less attractive, successful, and quality-content-oriented, crashing the price, and ultimately shooting all of these people in the foot even more, erasing any opportunity to really pull themselves up out of poverty via Steem.

Easy for me to say, I suppose, but that's how I see it.