https://steemit.com/steem/@l0k1/introducing-smackdown-kitty

I think this one might be something that fits the bill for what you are looking for to counter spam/circlejerk bots. Please do visit https://steemit.chat/channel/steem-coop-general if you want to talk with us about this particular issue.

Of course at present the development process has stalled, but as @personz, the guy doing the code for the bot, has been explaining, we are going to use it to attempt to neutralise some of the highest paying self-voted comments from users over 1000SP. To do more than this, it needs interested users to delegate SP to boost her ability to smack these wankers down (and I don't apologise for making an analogy between self voting yourself a $1+ reward on a comment).

Why I am referring you to this is, perhaps you can make some suggestions how we could expand the scope or refine it somehow so that we can also have her targeting these circle jerk bots, or lay out more clearly how you see the problem and what you think can be done about it. I am very good at exploring problem domains and discovering attack surfaces, so perhaps we can help each other.