My solution:
Have 2 trending pages - 1 that people have used bots and one that have organically gotten alot of upvotes because its clearly good content.I wonder if there is a way to do this??
I would love this i would go to the 'organic trending page'
My thoughts are to incorporate promoted into trending once every x slots in a clearly labeled way. It's clearly not working as a separate tab. Once people realize that this is a way to pay for exposure, bid bots don't need to be used for advertising. And they really would not have much reason to exist except for greed.
Then the vision would be that trending would only be organic (except for promoted slots).
If they stay profitable, even if promoted content is incorporated into trending, people will still choose bid bots because that way they can recover the money they spend into promoting their content.
Right, extrapolating current state, they'd be losing money to do that. I feel like in order to get that high amount, they necessarily are losing quite a bit.
So we'll have see the cost comparing promoted vs bid bot trending I guess. And the slotted mechanism could work in other ways too (targeting tags, etc)