Hey @steevc. I totally understand your concerns. The junk loaded Trending is a plague for the platform. Assessing the quality of a content is a challenge, especially if you have many to assess. As we develop, we will try to build some tools to help us in that task. Such tools are already in the pipeline, we are looking for building an integrated tool in our admin dashboard to help with:
- detecting plagiarism (this one is tough)
- automatically pre-score a content based on various points which I won't reveal as to not allow users to find a way around it when it will be implemented
There will also be random checks on user blogs and we will cancel membership of any authors breaking our rules and quality requirements.
Hopefully, Steemit Inc will also develop new features to help with reversing the current trend.
If you could do this transparently and still have it work, it would actually be useful. Bad actors will eventually figure out fragile but hidden algorithms. It's generally not seen as a good form of security to hide implementation details. Good IP, but not necessarily the most trustworthy.
The pre-scoring is just a first layer to help the human being that will actually perform the upvote actions. We don't want a fully automated upvote process as as you said, it's not necessarily the most trustworthy.
Thank you for your valuable input.