Yep. @jerrybanfield did a post explaining how you could double your Steem power in ~180 days if you have more than 100 to begin with, i view this as a major issue myself.
This discourages people to actually use the website as a decentralized blogging/social media site and encourage people to use this as a money making platform, but what they don't realize is, in efforts to milk the platform for personal gain, it might drive the price down sharply thus rendering their self upvotes useless.
Of course, I'm talking about the scenario where a significant fraction of users start doing it
Tl;dr: if everyone started doing it, Steem will be worth a few pennies real soon
Yeah I saw @jerrybanfield 's post on that but I'm not sure if his calculations were 100% correct. Regardless of if it was spot on or not we know that people could really yank a lot out of the reward pool by doing this. If enough people think it is "unfair" people start dropping off like what happened last time.
I think even despite this there is a lot more money floating around and the people with the higher reputations don't want to risk it because they will get exposed pretty fast for doing it and people remember that stuff.
True, but for moderate reputation users, there will be some temptation to do this and a great chance to get away unnoticed too.. They might even be able to power down and cash out in time before crashing the website, there definitely is that danger