We need to deal with bidbots and shit content in trending. It's an embarrassment. That means people need to develop curation and community tools.
Steemit itself...should look into either getting rid of trending, implementing another tab, or at least implementing some of the suggestions made months ago. One example would be incorporating promoted into trending or one of the traditional ad spaces, like the top or side. While I am quite positive that for most the whole "advertising" aspect is just an excuse, it would at least remove that, and burn some steem regularly. Implementing a few solutions would likely at least reduce the abuse to a certain degree.
Additionally, people need to flag the shit content that has insane upvotes. Right now they're afraid to. Separating the flags from downvotes might help with this. Flag/downvote rewards might also help.
What exactly do people think happens when so many users abuse the system like this? People come here and see this place as a pay to win joke. It hurts the price of Steem immeasurably.
There are a ton of other small things that we can and should do, but it all comes down what we can do to make Steem look better. It's a good coin. The main thing is probably to stop letting people make it look bad.