How do these accounts get manually approved? I always thought the manual approval process was eyeballing a long list of accounts and picking obvious scammed ones out. But how would a list of zhiyinXXX, routingXXX, and prefixXXX pages long get past it?

Furthermore, if Steemit Inc doesn't diligently remove delegation from these accounts, and other groups of spam accounts it encourages the abusers to abuse more.

There are groups of accounts like this that are solely being used to spam the blockchain for penny votes that can add up to tens or hundreds of dollars. But they shit all over the blockchain and the nodes that make up the network to do it. Spammers like this are partially responsible for the inflated network utilization, compared to how it would be if it was just legitimate users.

This spam leads to prohibitive resource use, which has a significant negative impact on existing services and adds barriers to entry for new ones. For example, Poloniex's wallet is still down and I struggle to think why besides the resource requirements for a Steem node.

Growth is imperative but the drag from this kind of thing can keep Steem from flying higher. It is an issue which I have personally raised on multiple occasions and I still don't think it's taken seriously enough. The approval of obvious groups of accounts like this is a prime example.

Ultimately Steem's health is up to all of its users, not just Steemit Inc. @Patrice and the @Spaminator team have been doing an amazing job for the Steem ecosystem in counteracting this type of costly spam.

However, if Steemit Inc creates spam botnets it is important they take the job of undelegation seriously, to mitigate the damage to the network. It's also more important to do things to prevent the creation of new accounts for botnets.