Wow, that's so lame, it's sad that someone would abuse the system that way. What I noticed on my one post that has earned quite a bit of Steem is that there are so many upvotes on it I can't see who all upvoted it either...at first I went through the people that upvoted and either followed or read something of their back, but eventually it had a tonne of votes and I couldn't even see. It must be hard to keep track if you are getting a lot of votes to go through everybody. I'm willing to dedicate time to Steemit but you really can't take too much of a "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" mentality about it.