Yeah they could be the reason Steem suddenly drops every time it goes up. You gave me a great idea. We create a wall of shame website/steemit account. A bot to recognize and screen steemit for this kind of behaviour. We give them an index of abuse and start exposing them on a daily basis. Maybe even get a couple of trending posts for more exposure. Then we ask good whales like @thejohalfiles to delegate some SP so that we can start flagging them. After some time we give them an option; either stop circle jerking or give 25% of your daily votes to projects like @curie
I'll definitely lay this on paper, write a post about it and ask for @utopian devs to help me create it. Let the flag wars begin!