Both algorithms are based on the amount of increase in rewards, over a period of time - I believe. Hot is basically the same thing as trending, just on a shorter term. I agree that some more tweaking would be good here though.
As far as the authors that are hot/trending, that is more a matter of user voting behavior, than the algorithm itself. If stakeholders are not voting for lesser known authors, then they won't be finding themselves in the hot/trending pages.
Basing anything on comments gets tricky/messy because it can easily be abused by people with multiple accounts, just creating a bunch of low quality comments. Being able to do it in a way that is not prone to abuse is actually a really difficult problem.
This makes sense, but I feel that this is also the problem. To your point, the "voting behavior" is not based on the number of votes, but based on the amount of power that the votes have.
This is another significant issue in the community, people with multiple accounts (including bots). We need to (as a community), develop a method to identify and de-prioritize the posting and auto-voting bots. While no individual bot is drastically draining the rewards pool (yet), the increase in the number of bots and the decrease in the number of original posts generated by the community, all of the bots seem to be taking over a recognizable portion of the rewards pool.
The more we let the bots take over, the more bots you will see pop up. More and More People are running with the "If you can't beat 'em, Join 'em" mentality and that is only hurting the community more.
Bots are allowed. They in of themselves are not a problem. It all depends on how they are used. There is also not really a way to stop them either. There are people that are problematic too - it is not just bots :)
I agree 100%! haha
Afterall, bots are created by people. But in either case, each of the "malicious" bots are diluting the rewards pool by generating more votes than a single person would ever generate, in a much shorter time period. By letting these bots continue to exist, we're encouraging more of them to be built and discouraging new original content from being shared in the community. If you can just make a bot, then sit back and reap the rewards, the incentive to build and grow the community for the future is greatly depressed.
The number of accounts/votes doesn't matter at all as far as payouts. It is 100% a matter of SP.
There are bots that do a lot better job at curating actual 'good' posts better than many humans. There also many humans who do a better job than bots.
I think you hit on it earlier, it is not really the bots that are the problem, it is their owners. Whether the bots are there or not, most of the underlying problems are the same.