Seems like you got some cool information out of this. I don't really understand the bot brigading if it was just an experiment to see if a proposed reward would lead to interactions...
I'm curious, how did you calculate the amount of BTC sent out to upvoters? Was it time sensitive? Like, first come, bigger amount? How did you deal with those who upvoted but forgot to comment; vice versa? According to the block explorer, some individuals received a much larger reward in comparison to others (who got mostly Satoshis).
I wonder what conclusions one could glean from this experiment other than, hmmm free stuff.
RE: I'm Andrew. The guy who put together a steemit experiment that blew up in his face and costed him $570!