I kind of see this as akin to where people build backlinks to their site by posting "quality" comments on someone's high ranking wordpress blog. It's one of the strategies of internet marketing. Find a blog similar to your niche, post a comment disguised as helpful and then have your link attached to it. Nothing new.

I think it is a normal part of growth. At first I thought Steemit was just a place I could earn money on my old blogs. Likewise with Bitcoin, I wanted to just make money with that in the beginning. Now I am heavily invested in crypto because I like the technology and I'd be lying if I said I didn't care about the money I'm making.

What does kind of annoy me is how little people downvote/flag content. This site is supposed to pay authors according to the "wisdom of the crowd." As of now, it looks like it doesn't exist. You are supposed to downvote content if you don't agree with the payout. That is how things are supposed to even out so that people making garbage posts and using upvote bots to go to trending don't actually make any money off of it. If people assessed the content and looked at the payout to determine whether they should upvote/downvote content, then you wouldn't have all these people raping the rewards pool.