The stats!
Hey man I respect your work and wonder if you are willing to do a deep dig..
A long time ago I discovered automated account creation on steemit..
It has a clear scripted/bot influence

@aaa @aab @abb
@bbb ....
@ccc
@ddd

Then there's generic accounts of words (even offensive ones like @nigger @nazi @whore then even more simply generic words like @kangaroo @rabbit @water etc.. oh yeah that's an account too @etc

So clearly it goes on and on then the variants mean that there would be a very large amount of these dummy accounts. Many created at the very beginning of steemit. So obviously it was to create fake user numbers.

There's sinister work at play too because some established names were then taking those steem out of those accounts and hording.

So that's a thing then.. still.
Creating accounts for the sake of numbers.

Which in the end just reflects bad on this operation. If you're interested in investigating maybe you value this comment. If you do investigate and don't report the findings I can understand that too as it will reflect bad on some big wigs here.
Which is why when I mentioned it back in 2017 those big wigs didn't like my actions.

Anyway that's the beauty of Blockchain.
That data is always there for the finding.