I'm afraid I don't know how to solve the issue, but I do know where I think I want things to go. Maybe knowing where we wan to be and working backwards can help. At any rate, the idea is to be able to look at the reputation of someone and determine whether or not they are a user who is adding value to the social media side of the platform through their posts, and I would add, comment and curation. There are other activities on the blockchain, but the reputation rating was supposed to be set aside for those who actually participate on the blockchain and can be considered a reliable source of information, value, etc. I think you need to include curation and commenting too, but again, I don't know how that happens.

Anything else, such as witnesses working on projects that are blockchain related, or community devs providing other tools or apps, but not specific to the post side of things, maybe they need their own recognition of some kind, but it would be nice for those who are putting in the time on chain to be distinguished from those who are not.

I think the upvote is over used. It should serve the function of curating, and that's it. I don't know what else to do, but having virtually everything tied to upvoting isn't the answer.

As it is, I would rather we scrapped it. I'm not into flagging that much, so not having a reputation would be fine, because then people could still function instead of being shunned into negative territory, and would only lose potential rewards. There needs to be a different way to deal with spam, and so far, the best way is having Steemit Inc remove their delegations. When they pop up again, take it away again.