Our analysis of the reward system reveals the fact that more than 16% of the transfers of cryptocurrency in steemit are sent to curators suspected to be bots and also finds the existence of an underlying supply network for the bots, both suggesting that the current cryptocurrency driven rewards system in steemit is under severe misuse that deviates from the original intended goal of rewarding high quality content.

This is from a paper coming out in July, a real empirical scientific study of steem, explaining with MATH how it's reward system is broken, or rather "deviates" from its intended goal.