I'll repeat what I've said before. Add the option to decline Trending to a post. Problem solved. I don't think the problem here is volunteers burning tokens from the reward pool so as to support the price but the unwanted visibility of all the burn posts. Burn posts need to be in Trending only rather infrequently.
Or move the votes to comments instead. Making trending worse helps nobody.
Comments also will show up in trending unfortunately
Really? But you can mitigate that by making a large enough number of comments.
That would help too. In fact better because no coding required.
I feel like I've seen comments make it to trending before... I could be wrong though.
That's not really a great idea. It is contrary to how Steem works to let people unilaterally hide their posts. Every self-voting scammer would use that.
These posts may be ugly, but they are visible and people can decide whether the payouts are good for Steem (vote) or bad for Steem (downvote). Mostly voters are deciding they are good for Steem, albeit ugly.
It could certainly work to have multiple Trending pages one of which allows or self-exclusion, but that's a bit more of a complicated change.
That is true but only a very tiny minority of farm posts ends up in Trending or ever has.
I think the best policy is for those who want to support the burnpost and sbdpotato initiatives is to upvote comments set up for that purpose.
Right, because they would be highly visible and scrutinized, so it is an ineffective strategy that isn't used....
I would say this is very, very wrong. Some of the biggest farmers such as @haejin were on Trending every day for months or years. I can think of several others but I'm not going to name them because they weren't quite as blatant.
Now extrapolate that to where instead the farmers can block visibility. In fact we already have this experience (see below).
I'm all for that but comments also show up on Trending!
This wasn't previously the case but was changed specifically to give visibility (for community scrutiny) on large comment payouts. It was seen that farmers would hide their votes on comments.
BTW, this is also the reason that even spammers with rep < 0 aren't hidden when they have a > 0 payout. The idea is to ensure that all payouts are visible so they can be downvoted if undeserved.
Not if a sufficiently large number of comments is made.