I wrote a little piece several weeks ago called, value is not created it is transferred. This pretty much sums up what these types of posters are doing. They are accumulating and transferring actual wealth to themselves regardless of their content value. The downside to this is as they cash out their rewards for income with their worthless content and they reduce the value of the existing remaining assets. This in and of itself doesn't sound like a very big deal but when you are combing hundreds of dollars a day in actual value off of the community without actually contributing to it, it's the community that has to pay for it because the value that they inserted into the community for community growth is being removed by someone who's not actually contributing.

Now I support the idea of a no censorship environment, so muting these individuals is not the answer. But, there does need to be a justifiable and effective way to make illicit behavior unsuccessful. The easiest way to do this would be to create sets of programmed laws that govern how an upvote or downvote can be used. For example, No single account can receive any more than 5% of your votes. This means that a person must vote for 19 other authors before they can vote again for the same author. Unfortunately, the comber would likely simply create 20 accounts to curate with the bots. How I would programically counter that is make vote power a calculation of the uniqueness of your last 100 votes. 100 unique votes equals 100% vote power, so repeatedly voting on the same authors reduces your max vote power. There are ways to programically control misuse without singling out abuses or censorship. Making abuse programically harder to do forces combers to adapt or seek easier opportunities.