What's happening here is not peculiar to Steemit or even online communities although the focus or justification in this instance is the financial incentivisation of blogging.

We're very sensitive to unfairness. Some work by the University of Leicester a couple of years ago found that we are "hardwired" to co-operate through our evolutionary development (part of our biological make-up rather than a cultural phenomonen) and a corollary to that is that we have a reaction to perceived or real unfairness or cheating. It's part of our survival mechanism so, I guess, a good thing, and one that's been undermined through the rise and prevalence of ideologies around capitalism and neoliberalism, both comparatively new and very persuasive sets of ideas.

The challenge, I think, is what we do about unfairness or cheating, when we come across them. We do love drama, and we do love getting into the drama triangle. That must produce some kind of satisfaction for us ("there, I won, I'm right" maybe?). It's also massively tiring and destructive.