Wow. That's incredible analysis. Thank you for taking the time to look at this. Yes, the spam posts are annoying but what you have shown is that the great number of posts are within a voting/posting group of people.
So I checked out some of them. What also happens within the posting/voting group is that they upvote each others comments.
One example;
the comment "good post" received 16 upvotes.
the author of the blog responds "Thank you" but he/she didn't receive any upvotes.
the response comment is "Your welcome" and this receives 15 upvotes
It is very obvious what is happening.The people doing the upvotes have $0 to $.01 so not much money is exchanged.
Is there a voting bot that automatically votes on comments? or maybe most or even all of these 16 accounts are controlled by the same person? That is another violation to weed out.
Thanks for reviewing and policing the forum and trying to keep it strong and vital.
Thank you!
I would side with thinking that they are owned by the same person.
It's ok to have multiple accounts, but using them solely to upvote your other accounts is poor form and something @spaminator is on the lookout for.
Cheers!