The question is does Steemit or any of the interfaces still have room for an organic, un-promoted, new content discovery section?
I think the whole notion of "trending" is a little nebulous when a site is too big to be a single community (Steem is bigger than that) but also too small to be representative of a much larger zeitgeist. Twitter thinks it represents a country's zeitgeist but I'm having serious doubts about what it does represent and the high level of control they're imposing on trending).
What Dan's proposing here is that Trending will become largely a paid-promotional area where the payment directly benefits the entire community. That's not a bad thing.
Back in the late 1990's in London's nascent tech startup scene (and before the 2000 crash) I remember a guy pitching me his idea called "Paid Attention" which was a physical device plugged into your home phone to opt into receive marketing phone calls at a specific time of day for 30 minutes. I have no idea what became of the guy or his startup.
I believe we need to mesh the two together. Organic trending will command a lot higher price to be promoted on then one that is just filled with ads. So I believe the magic balance is to find a way to sneak some ads into trending without it being too obtrusive. Of course those ads will need to pay steem, it has to cost money to promote or trending gets filled with garbage.
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I doubt that it would because relatively few people actually want to promote, and then few others want to vote, without receiving rewards. Yeah it happened in the case cited but its very likely to be an exception.
If it did becomes rampant then we could call it a problem but I'm doubting it.
The vast majority of the vote buying we've seen has at least part of its motivation getting the rewards back from the pool.