The longer I'm here, the more I'm starting to think that the paid voting bots are a form of arbitrage that arises from an imbalance in the incentive system.
I have long advocated for each author to be able to set their own author/curation reward ratio on a per-post basis. It just doesn't make sense that an inexperienced author and an experienced top-performer would give out the same percentage to their curators. With adjustable curation ratios, newer authors could compete by giving some of their rewards to their voters.
Because that capability does not exist, maybe paid voting bots have arrived to arbitrage the gap.
I think they are sometimes used that way but generally regardless of the incentive system it's important to have a way to promote/advertise your content here. Simply setting a high curation percentage wouldn't get you the visibility of buying promotion.
Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't often look at the trending page, so I'm not sure how much visibility they're providing. OTOH, I guess that's true with more traditional advertising too. You place an ad, but you have no guaranty that it will ever actually get someone's attention.
I also rarely look at the trending page (except sometimes just to see what all the fuss is about). But it is what everyone who is new to steemit.com sees first, and it gives a very bad impression. It's as if the first thing you see when you go to Facebook is a list of the highest paid advertisements!
My suggestion was to get rid of the global trending page and instead ask new users to choose a few interests and then show them trending posts from the categories they choose. That way there will be a better mix of promoted and non-promoted posts and they will at least be more relevant to the reader.
I would actually love that. I remember seeing somebody create a UI mockup (think it was similar to Pinterest if I'm not mistaken) and it showed new users making those selections. Not only is that more personal to the end user but also allows Steemit to provide up better content for said user.
That is a good idea. I am fairly new user and it took quite a while to get my feed showing mainly stuff I am interested in. Picking some initial areas of interest would definitely make the new user experience better. I suspect alot of new users see the trending page and maybe start to question whatever positive impression of Steemit bought them there in the first place