So over the past week or so I've noticed that the same author's continuously have trending articles on a daily basis. Naturally, I started to read their posts to see what they were doing that I wasn't and I started noticing a trend.
The same people were upvoting and more importantly the same whales were upvoting.
Why the same author's trend
Upon further digging I noticed that some of these accounts were 'curation bots'. They have identified high quality author's and or identified 'popular' authors and added them to their bot list. Anytime an author on the bot list posts the same thing happens. The bot upvotes, and subsequent bots upvote and this causes the the article to become trending.
Once an articles starts trending a snowball effect happens. People visit the site, see the article, either read it and upvote or upvote it just to grab the small curation reward.
The whales and their bots aren't dumb, that's why they are whales. They know that if they get the ball rolling, it will trend and explode and they will get the majority of the curation reward.
It's no coincidence we see a lot of #introduceyourself posts trend. The reason is because the 
Same goes for some of our #travel bloggers. I'm not saying their content isn't great, a lot of times it is. But the same travel bloggers are trending on a daily basis because the same whale bots are upvoting them.
Is this a problem?
I don't know yet and I'm not sure. First, I think the bots play a vital roll because they promote liquidity but I think this was more of an issue in the beginning when there were fewer users. Similar to how the Reddit founder had many accounts to make it look like the site was popular.
But now that Steem has over 30,000 accounts I don't think this is an issue. And if the bots are continuously updating and adding new author's to their list great content will continue to be buried.
Is this unfair?
Maybe but life's not fair, deal with it. Let me be clear, I'm not complaining in this article, I'm just stating my observations.
SteemIt Going Forward
I do think this issue of bot upvoting needs to be addressed in the long run as I mentioned before, great content will be buried. And without great content a social network doesn't exist.
Let me know your thoughts below!
I invite 
