I think as long as the value of STEEM is low, resource credits are keeping spam lower than it was. It takes some established spam farms, with some RCs spread out among each account, to effectively get off the ground. Most can't survive.

However, that's not to say spam is completely gone, but it is much better, in my opinion then it was before.

However, as some are noting, it has done so at the cost of the new user, who doesn't immediately find a way through delegations, investing or otherwise powering up to raise the effective level of RCs. So, it's been a double edged sword, and at a cost to actual legit accounts.

What will be interesting to see is, how quickly the activity in dormant spam accounts where the SP delegation has yet to be removed will return as the price of STEEM rises. It will also be interesting to see how quickly Steemit Inc acts in their removal of delegations to said accounts after they revive.

The fact that Steemit has decided to remove the delegations from proven spammers, scammers and plagiarists is actually a step in a more effective direction, and will probably be the cause of reducing spam on the blockchain, even if it means those spammers will continue to find ways to open new accounts.

It would be nice if we could move to some form of Know Your Customer/Client so alt accounts could be immediately traced to the main account. I don't know how that would work without some folks feeling their privacy was being invaded, but I've yet to figure out what good someone will actually do for the blockchain by opening up hundreds of alt accounts. I know what they hope to do. I don't know how it really helps others.

it would be nice to get to a point where we can actually identify legit users vs. bots or alt accounts meant to form some flavor of farm. It would also be nice to then be able to up the RCs to the legit users so they can function until they have enough on their own. By knocking down spam, we've effectively cut off the new users ability to do anything, and since they can't really do anything, they can't really complain about it effectively, so then most people think everything is just fine when there's a growing, ongoing issue that will need to be resolved at some point, rather than being oblivious to it or ignoring it.