Sad thing is, Steemit itself is designed to encourage this behavior. It's optimal play that achieves the ill-disguised goal of funneling as many tokens as possible upward to bot-controlling whale accounts.

I very much doubt the witnesses have the guts to fix this, because to do so would require things like account bans and asset confiscation, which cryptocurrency's "decentralized" libertarian ethos abhors. (Centralized power is of course Good when it's delivering ROI to already wealthy asset-holders.)