Oh, wow. I must say this is new information to me, but if this is true then perhaps there is more to this story indeed. Sigh, oh Steem....
Account creation with upvote bots is a huge problem, that I don't know how it is possible to solve without the introduction of digital identities. Even then, there are clickfarms in China. It is for this reason that I can't believe 100% in Steem's future the way things are now.. there are too many ways to abuse the system, and the bigger Steem grows the bigger this problem will get.
Easiest way to solve this issue is an army of moderators with delegated SP to find abusers such as @haejin, flag/downvote until they correct their behaviors. The problem is where to get this delegated SP around millions. @ned or @steemit can delegate. Or, a benevolent whale do that. Or, a group of good whales collaborate to make a fund (e.g. as OP from bernie) to counteract these abusers.
With a research leg such as @paulag and in future using ML/DL/AI, particularly for finding self/proxy vote abusers, proposed fund will counteract them.
It is not on the edge of ethics since these blatant abusers can be easily identifiable. For interest, anyone can look into this tool and find "thoughtless comments" such as "Cute :D, Thanks, Haha........" earning $50 which is potentially $250...that does not look good for steem blockchain.
http://www.steemreports.com/trending-comments/
I think one step would be to work as a community against users who abuse the system. You, me and the whole community can decide for themself (by flagging) if we want to support this kind of behaviour in the future.
I don't know if the answer is self-regulation. Even though it will work for a while, I don't know if it is sustainable in the long term.
Personally, I would like to see a maximum reward per post implemented, regardless of SP. @haejin's posts aren't of great quality and probably don't deserve hundreds of dollars, but may I point out that @ned's post above has already raked in $750 as well?
I am one of those accounts that just have been made to support haejin. I know him from youtube and wanted to actively support him because thats what he deserves imho. There are many like me which are simply grateful for all his work and that's how as an individual you can support him for his amazing work.
You'll never convince them barsic. It's like trying to talk to a flat earther.
I completely agree and you can see where STEEM is heading if the devs will not intervene on these issues.
check the first post about this that berniesanders made. I did some resarch on the data i could find. Dig deeper and make your own mind about this.