I see this article and the whales that upvoted it as :
"When a bunch of blowhards - usually politicians - get together for a debate but usually end up agreeing with each other's viewpoints to the point of redundancy, stroking each other's egos as if they were extensions of their genitals (ergo, the mastubatory insinuation). Basically, it's what happens when the choir preaches to itself. "
AKA Circlejerk
Yeah, that's how I'm reading it too. His title says "investigating" and he talks about knowledge being power, but there doesn't appear to be any "investigation" and there appears to be a complete lack of knowledge about sock puppets and collusive voting.
Let's throw out the bot issue for a moment. Instead, let's focus on these sock puppets that have been likely created by whales, upvoted by whales from their initial posting, continually trending from whale votes, gaining popularity from that trending, and then cashing out once the accounts have been identified. And let's talk about the fact that this is currently happening across multiple accounts. Scroll through the trending page and see if you can identify them. It's not hard to do. They're all alike in a variety of ways. This needs to be publicly addressed at some point. Thousands of SBD per week are being funneled into these accounts.
It isn't cute. It isn't funny. It's going to do real damage to the credibility of this platform - and the longer it continues, the worse it will get.
Circlejerk with a following herd of minnow compulsive sycophants