If 100% of the rewards pool is redistributed to the low level users voting on the post... what are their gains? VESTS? That take 13 weeks to turn into STEEM again? c'mon. They can't even transfer them.
I'm well aware of how spread farming works... and it's never done by giving out the SBD received. That's what is being farmed and then transferred back to a central account.
Though... perhaps you're right... the 0.5 SP in vests it accumulates might be the windfall the account is after... especially considering how this user is, if you bothered to look, actually making tons of other genuine content posts. Probably all just some grand obscene cover for it being a farm sockpuppet bot...
"2.934 SBD, and 0.463 STEEM POWER for lazarescu.irinel/free-steem-power-01-01-2018"
The only reason I noticed this account is that it was resteemed by another farming account.
It's difficult to make a definitive correlation and I may spend some time mapping them out.
I did find one being powered down to likely cash out. This activity when down en masse may market implications as well. I know at this time you may be skeptical but that's ok. I'm going to continue investigating these operations because I am very suspicious.
Look in his comments section, clearly human responses... in a timely manner... as well as fairly regular posts about Romania. He's trying to offer a small service (and it is small) that only minnows ever really use while growing a follower base for his other posts to be noticed...
Since the only posts anyone ever really notices are those by whales or those by the sockpuppets of whales, etc.
Want to put your VP to good use flagging, go kill off all of the spam "nice post bro" bots. They're WAY more destructive to Steemit than these sorts of things. They're the reason users are leaving, many of them writers/etc. They came here with great original content to find votes are all about a) a steem/steemit circle jerk, b) flat-earth/antivaxx/conspiracy theories, c) people bitching about how other people use votes, d) spam.
If you focus on spam bots you could be doing your part to eliminate A, C and D... all at once!
Rest assured, we will be after them soon. I need to figure out how I am going find those programmatically. It may take some manual effort plus python but we'll figure it out for sure.
The scam whales' day will come but it cannot be a direct assault as we are not ready for that. In the Marines, we learned a concept known as maneuver warfare which stands in contrast to a war of attrition which is basically a game of numbers. Presently, we don't have the numbers but that can change. We have witness support. Want to get paid. Here is a perfect way!
Maneuver warfare uses strategy to hit them in their weak points. You don't go straight after the tank. You go after the supply depot that provides for the tank. Have you considered perhaps the rewards that are getting powered down are going to the scam whales? I'm not saying all but probably a good %.
I have seen some posting multiple times a day. There goes that curation. Maybe it would be advantageous to upvote other minnows. Let's show the world what we can do.
I encourage you to join us with your voting power against freesteem. You will get rewards and then you might noticing your posts actually getting rewards, too. Consider all the rewards getting sucked up by free steem. I doubt all of them get back to you from the minimum 4-5 accounts doing it.
Maybe find distinct tags. minnowsupvotingminnows
Something like that.
minnowsupvotingminnows I like... and I do. it's thousands of times more effective than petty attacks on scammers.