Yeah I think the requirement of coordination and acting as a community is the biggest issue. Let's face it, the people who are just spamming the system is obviously only in for the short term individual gains, and so doesn't really care if steem goes to the moon or bust in the future as long as they can get their earnings now.

In regards to downvoting, I think for a lot of minnows (including myself) the major reason that is stopping us do it is retaliation. You never know what connection a person has, and if you accidentally step on someone with a solid backing you are toasted. I know someone who tried to stand up to spam and just got bashed by retaliated downvotes because it was an account with lots of SP.

I had a look @burnpost. I think that self-sacrificing aspect of it is hard to grasp especially for new comers. Also, it feels like burning is not as constructive as upvoting good posts though. Doesn't burning the reward pool decreases the payout of all posts, including high quality posts? But I do understand it is much harder to manually curate for good content especially it's so hard to find nowadays, and the @burnpost method is probably effective in that sense.