Email verification is worthless: it's trivial to create fake email accounts. Bot checking is not very effective as many click farms are operated as sweat shops off China with cheap labor . The phone verification was the absolute basic requirement to (somewhat) contain the click farm abuse and should have been there since day-1 but even that won't stop click farms: Facebook already has phone verification, and that doesn't stop click farms from farming hundreds of thousands of accounts because they buy SIM cards wholesale on the blackmarket and swap SIM cards between account creations. At best, this creates a fixed cost in time and resources: there are only that many SIM cards that can be swapped in a day of work, and it still has a cost to buy these SIM cards wholesale, so click farms will probably use all that they already have but may not buy more just to abuse Steem, at least not at the current growth level which buys some time.

Anyway, all that and much more was already discussed with @ned 6 months ago. Good to see that Steemit finally figures the hard way what they could have realized a long time ago by simply taking into account early advice.

Next thing you'll realize is that all the "good" (at this rate, it will soon include everything remotely pronounceable in english) have been taken already including every Fortune 500 companies, every media outlet, every celebrity, every crypto company and exchange, and top 1000 twitter posters etc. I told @ned to reserve these when it was clear that names were being squatted, but that was just shrugged off like everything else. Now you'll either have to expropriate the name holders and see the large libertarian and anarchist user base flee, impose a minimum reputation requirement to holding a "premium" account, or tell interested companies that they'll have to make do with "google123" and "amazonsteemit". Such a pity that something that would have been trivial and painless in the early days becomes such a pain later on when all it would have taken to avoid it was being a bit more proactive and receptive to feedback.