There are some very complex mechanisms at play here. It's easy to say steem is just giving away money, it can't work but it's really not so simple. I guess time will tell.

Great post! Lots of scammers out there I was thinking this to myself just yesterday that I wonder if there are some people who have 10 or 20 fake steemit accounts to vote on their own content to get it into the hot section of the website. Interesting

Keep it flowingz

With the quality of highly paid posts that don't seem like having any value, it is evident that there is some foul play.

We're going to see sophisticated gaming of the system emerge -- I mean we already have.  Certain users gets 7-8 whale votes before anyone else votes, so they seem to be automatic -- this leads to their posts rocketing up and pushing into the $1,000's within half an hour and begets more voting as one would expect.  There are strategies like having bots that comment the same thing for all newbie posts that are really helpful, but what if 10 people are doing that?  Your site and [@discombobulated 's addition tweak of the code](http://www.steemitx.com/) are invaluable for analyzing the shenanigans of Steem.  A good place to look to start copying what works.  

My only fear is that some of these emergent strategies will wreck long term Steem value by juicing short term gains for whales or automatic posting strategies but not creating a diverse and interesting ecosystem on Steem.  We'll see.  Exciting to watch.

very interesting. I hope the team of steemit will have something against them. Hope they have some mechanics against it.

and upvote bots too
https://steemd.com/@curator

People always try to game everything and end up messing up up for the rest of us. Thanks for the diligence.

The bot wars have only just begun. Our future robot overlords will be both criminal and benevolent. They will fight each other, tech with tech. Competition will improve the ecosystem as we begin to develop digital morality. Could it be, within this volatile environment, Superintelligent AI is eventually born?

I hope all will fall back in balance again soon . Not funny what's going on . really sad ! Protect your homes guys (wallets )

Great post, how do I attract a "whale-vote"; would that be an idea for a successful tutorial post??

It's good to see people exposing this stuff

Informative. Thanx.

You are doing good work here, roeland! We, as a community need to pay attention to this kind of behavior and discourage and tax this kind of unethical behavior. 

Just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's RIGHT.

Also,  I have high hopes that, because blockchain is basically 100% transparent as more and more apps will use the data from the ledgers we'll see less and less "gaming" of the system especially because it's too easy to get caught, right?

My faith is strong, yet my doubts are at the door. 

Hope for the best....

I've seen this before and asked in Slack. Of what I think @ash or @pfunk said is (cant recall who exactly said it), they are sending money to new users for some giveaway they did.

Isnt the same guy who was offering high value SP accounts for sale not too long ago (as a matter of fact, it was right before the hack was discovered)

Good call out.. I've just been waiting to use Blocktrades to withdraw some Steem Dollars to Bitcoin.. SD loses value against SP or STEEM right?

I noticed when I posted a blog post earlier that it was immediately upvoted by @bola and @solen.  They both look like bots upvoting multiple new posts every minute.  see https://steemd.com/@bola and https://steemd.com/@solen

Just found out about the steemd site today and it was useful when the main steemit website was having problems, plus its got tons of other great features.

Now I just need to find out what vests are ...