When I invested and got involved in Steem it was because there was rules that were meant to enable Steem to achieve a valuable level of content discovery and rules insuring that people with SteemPower act responsibly (3 months vesting time / Reward curve)

These days it seems like most of the whales don't care to police the other whales that allow for opportunistic actors to circumvent the 3 month rule.

Modus operandi:

• Beg a greedy whale for delegation via a memo in a micro-payment.

• pay ~50 SBD,
• Receive ~100k SP delegation

• Spam and upvote your own posts.
  
• ... Profit

Now get ready for the large scale operation:

http://www.steemreports.com/delegation-info/?account=freedom

http://www.steemreports.com/outgoing-votes-info/?account=%40elizabeth302&days=14

This is the kind of posts being "promoted" by Hive account@elizabeth302
Hint: They're not being promoted, votes are done just before 6.5 day as to go unnoticed.
https://steemit.com/trump/@elizabeth302/melania-trump-wears-gucci-cheongsam-china-state-dinner

Wow! Such money, no views ? Much abuse!

Are we made fun of by @Freedom ?

How infuriating is that empty content book GIF posted under every of Hive account@elizabeth302 posts?

Or the kind of post being "promoted" by Hive account@askquestion
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@askquestion/daily-cryptocurrency-report-bitcoin-ethereum-steem-bitcoin-cash-or-11-13-2017
(they are just static prices from BTC, BCH and STEEM, and ETH.) with 40$ for 10 views.

Big Thanks to Hive account@steemreports for providing tools to uncover these schemes so easily.
http://www.steemreports.com

Witnesseses and Whales, we need to seriously discuss a HF to fix Steem's content discovery incentive rules. The few good whales are tired of spending SP/money to make up for a broken system and the users are tired of operating within an unfair system.
Let's not rely on Steemit Inc. for a fork, they seems fully focused on communities and SMT at the moment.