It all started with a humble comment...

I had read an article by @e-steem in which he discovered that clicking the auto upvote box on a new blog is less effective than upping it at a later point due to the original post depleting your voting power.

I thought that was a great find so I left the comment below

At which point I was nearly immediately flagged 29 times. In the interest of full disclosure, I deleted the comment and then re-posted an essentially identical one as my personal curiosity demanded to know if it would happen again. Well, it turns out it did happen again with the same speed.

Not only that, but the same group of users downvoted my posts in the same thread and some core members of the bot also down voted my comment in an unrelated thread

So I went to Steemd to do a little analysis

Comparing my steemd to the OP, e-steem's, I was interested to find that the same bot that targeted me had upvoted his article.

It seems like what this bot is likely trying to do is profit by giving articles value via upping them and then ensuring a selected commentator receives the maximum comment rewards possible by downvoting the competition. It's brilliant, really; brilliantly abusive.

Screenshots from my steemd feed showing the bot downing me

Screenshot showing the same bot upping the OP

Finally, a one-to-one comparison of the OP's ups vs my comment's downs.

Since this incident I have been harassed by this bot reacting to completely unrelated comments with the instant multiple-flags. This bot is also registering new names still. Analyzing my downvotes on my unrelated comment I was able to find this account. Which was created after my initial contact with the bot and is targeting all the same users.

This bot is even so audacious as to target good bots such as @cheetah who are our primary defense against abusive bots.

I know the platform has largely embraced bots, but surely there must be a way to reign in malicious bots such as this?

EDIT, this article has been targeted.