It doesn't take a long time to be a member of the community around here before you notice endless feeds of copy/paste posters that leech original content off other websites or other posters pumping out seemingly hundreds of posts per day. Yes, masturposting can feel really good at first to get your thoughts out there and earn a quick buck or two, but if you do it enough you should probably just feel dirty.
There is currently a five minute posting rate limit which is awesome, and the community does band together with flagging posts to help with reputation. But very smart people out there are figuring out how to game this system, and are earning money hand over fist with their masturposting actions. And, why not? Every single post put out into the steem ecosystem has a chance of going viral and earning a very high reward. Users are splitting their risk across many posts, hoping for the generous whale upvote.
Tales from the Git
Thankfully a solution to this is being discussed currently by the devs over on the steem github, specifically Daniel Larimer (@dan)(bytemaster). You can check out the entire conversation here, but below are some highlights:
Changes are potentially on the horizon, and that is awesome!
Look, everyone is here for the attention economy, it is what sets steem apart from other social platforms. This doesn't mean though it should tolerate community abuse. If this proposal is committed, spam posters would have their earnings capped and the information market would have to adjust to reflect these changes.