Well, I have mentioned this in the report. It's a simple strategy
- People follow thousands of people in hope that they will follow them in return
- Some people do follow them back
- After a few days or weeks they simply unfollow all people whom they had followed
- This makes their followers numbers more than following and to a newbie user visiting the profile, it seems that these are really popular users
I think the numbers in the report are a clear indicator. No normal user can unfollow 15,000 people in 1 day
One solution is to curb the number of users we can unfollow or even follow in 1 day. 500px does that!
Your suggestion makes sense. I believe the witnesses are reading posts and some day this can be implemented in the steemit blockchain.