I didn't at first, but now I'm just enjoying seeing how far they'll take this. I didn't even flag their post to begin with, and yet managed to get a place on their hit list. If they want a troll, I can give them a troll.

Absolutely, that's how I feel. It seems like a fairly simple solution to me, but I guess we'll just have to keep waiting and see if Steemit starts making changes.

There's still part of my mind that thinks that they could be playing a long game, and might slap a few hundred Steem onto their accounts. Overthinking no doubt.

It's not that I think there's no place for them, but active chatbots should at the very least have a blacklist of users who abuse them. They also just come across as clutter to me, the concepts are useful for building better services, but in their raw form... better suited to Twitter in my opinion.

I like your suggestion of them working with services like @abusereports though, and maybe @steemcleaners too. I've often thought these services should share information and maybe have a centralised blacklist.