I realize they did this to stop spam and they will tell themselves that they are succeeding.
They would be wrong in this as Asher showed in one of his post highlighting a post with in excess of 1700 comments that were spam. The only people allowed to spam on steemit are those that have sufficient steem power to do it.
Yes I've noticed this too... On one post I saw today, there were at least 10 well written lengthy robot-generated spam comments highlighting the virtues of understanding how to use the steemit system properly. Man that was so much better than the traditional "good post" spam of the past. I was thinking how awesome it is now that the spammers are rich articulate people now instead of poor 2-word users. This is really a major improvement, so I'm super shocked that the subscriber numbers haven't shot through the roof yet. ;)