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The difficulty is much lower than on the regular eth chain, and the price with the pump and dumps is so all over the place, that there actually is money to be made. There also aren't any pools setup on the etc fork(as far as i know) So as a solo miner, the difficulty is low enough to actually make a bit of profit that way as well.

ok, poloniex is also probably cashing in a lot of transacion fees from that...

It most definitely is. They aren't upset about the doubled transaction rate created by the fork.