What is abuse, and what is NOT abuse, @steemitblog? Indeed, what is merely differences of opinion, and what is actually abusive practice?

1. Code vs Community: In the 3+ years I have been here, this has often been discussed. What is avoided is the discussion of what the end result of a venue guided entirely by code would look like? And what what one guided primarily by community would look like? More specifically, we need to ask the question "what best serves the long-term objective of Steem THRIVING as a venue/blockchain?"

2. Using CODE to remove ambiguity: A seemingly unpopular choice to address the BidBot/purchased vote question is very simple: Call things what they are. Make it perfectly acceptable for people to "buy" as many votes as they wish, and to use bid bots to their hearts' content... and simply do what pretty much every other social venue does: If you artificially boost your content LABEL IT "PROMOTED CONTENT." You'll see this on twitter, Facebook, YouTube and most social sites. It's NOT rocket science.

Of course, critics fear that then they'll come off as "greedy" rather than "popular." Is that important? That's opinion, not reality.

3. Abuse takes many forms! I have to respectfully disagree with @mehta that there's no such thing as abuse. Whereas your points are good and reasonable, you are entirely looking at abuse from the perspective of "people being unhappy that others make too many rewards."

But what about stealing other people's content — or even identities — to to profit from their work?

What about things like what I call "The Downvote Mosquitoes" which is that swarm of thousands of tiny accounts who use ONLY the initial 15SP delegation from Steemit, Inc. to cast millions of tiny downvotes, with the express purpose of discouraging new/smaller account from posting, because the "organizer" is angry AND SPECIFICALLY WANTS STEEM TO FAIL?

4. What's the OBJECTIVE? It's nice that there's a discussion on "abuse," but in order to decide, don't we first need to decide what the GREATER OBJECTIVE of Steem is? We deal with two (often opposing) forces here. On one side, we can say the objective is Increasing the value of the Steem token. That's a long term proposition. On the other side, many only care about How many rewards will I get from my next post? because their intention is to constantly power down and cash out once a week to buy pizza. That's a short term perspective... it may offer the illusion of value right now, but the constant selling works against long term appreciation.

How can we truly address "abuse," till we have established what the greater objective is?