Yep, damn dirty bots... it was always a concern for me as to the health of this platform. Anytime something like this has been attempted in the past, meaning any platform that can make you money for essentially free, bots, cheats, and hackers will surely come out to play to take advantage of it.
Take the Diablo 3 auction house system, World of Warcraft gold, Kickstarter in general, sni.ps, and way too many more to even list. Hell even Reddit, the grand daddy frontpage of the internet is dominated by bots.
So let's hope that the Steemit crew can figure out a way to stay ahead of all these bad apples.
This is critical to the long term health of the platform!
Yeah :(