Just after having spent hours writing a 1000 word article, choosing/editing pictures, spell and grammar checks and all of the other tasks involved, I click 'Post'.
....20 seconds later:
Very good post friends
Looks very very good :) Followed
Very nice, Will be looking forward to your posts. Up-voted: hope you will visit my blog
Great post, very informative, thank you.
nice post
good one
nice post . thanks for share . Followed you
Hello. It's interesting blog !
Amazing thing ....
This is just a selection from today.
Note: Some people that wrote 'upvoted', didn't. I checked out of curiosity.
Now, I have some questions regarding this, but firstly I have to draw a line somewhere. When people comment on my posts, I generally upvote their comment a few cents. If they comment very well, I may give them up to 100 percent. Not much of a gift in my case, but it is the thought that counts I figure.
I try to read and reply to every comment but with the notifications not working, I am sure I have missed some. Unfortunately though, I have to limit this to people that comment something in relation to the post itself and I urge others that upvote comments to do the same.
This is not out of annoyance or vote thriftiness. This is to try to make Steemit a more social and engaging place to be.
I am not an author that garners a huge number of comments and I do get a little kick when I see there is a comment there. But when I go to the comment and it has nothing to do with the post, asks for a follow, lies about upvoting or resteeming or when I see that it is cut and paste by visiting the profile, I feel cheated.
Getting caught playing the numbers game with me is unlikely to get my vote, a follow or any other kind of support. Well, that is not completely true, this is in support of those that do this. It aims to get you to stop.
So, the questions I have:
1: How many people can this work for on the platform?
I know there are some like 
2: Who follows these people?
I can't imagine the more mature Steemit members following anything like this but perhaps the new-in feel that this is how the site works. After all, many other sites work in this way too where people may even buy followers to appear successful. But, if similar minded people follow each other, they make a low level cartel but out of sheer numbers, can have significant impacts on both the look and feel of the content in site and the reward pool.
3: Will it pay off?
For some it will, but as this becomes more prevalent, it will require a continual ramping up of efforts to get noticed. Again though, if there are many of these people supporting each other or bots upvoting bots, it can definitely bring value to the members. This will be a massive spamming of useless comment and post material that buries what is quality. This will drive investors away and in the end, there will be nothing left but a spiralling cycle of insanity.
In the long-term, it will make the platform very unattractive unless something can be done.
4: What can be done?
This is the million dollar (or in my case, 4 dollar) question. How I see it there are some actions that could happen.
Possible now:
- Firstly, stop promoting this behaviour by supporting it.
- Commenting on it in displeasure as inaapropriate
- Downvoting/flagging it
- Not upvoting it of course
Possible later?:
- A filter that mutes anyone over a certain amount of posts
- A
type thing for it
- A bot that finds and flags cut and paste comments
- Communities that these people can be cast out from
I don't know what is best or not, just another thing to think on for me. I am hoping that there are some smart cookies on the development side that can find a way to curtail this behavior.
On a side note, when following one of the comments above ( 
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
