Too many think POB is Proof of Bot! Steemit don't seem interested in countering that impression. New users will just see Trending and think that's what they should do too.
There are some of us who do flag posts that are over-promoted. We only need to take about 20% off to kill their profit, but some are just too big for us to really affect. Certain people do this persistently to trend and ramp up their rep. It's not how Steem was intended to work, but the freedom they gave us also allows people to abuse the system.
I don't have all the answers, but I'll keep trying to make Steem better for those who do good stuff.
A turn of phrase that needs to be looked at carefully: "it's not how Steem was intended to work."
Well, either it is working as intended or the encoding of the economic rules is flawed.
Economic systems rely on positive and negative feedback loops to be both dynamic and stable. There is no point hoping that behaviour will follow some plan when the rules allow for an altogether different plan and different behaviour. It's not "freedom", it's just a naive economic code.
There are limits to how much you would restrict what people can do with Steem as it could hamper good activities. It was intended that users would curate to get rewards where they are deserved, but it seems selling votes is more lucrative. If specific measures were added to stop that then people may find ways around it. People are more versatile and it's up to them how we move forward. I'll keep on flagging abusers.
Yes, one needs to think carefully about code changes. One of the results of game theory is that bad actors can never be wholly removed from a system, but their rewards can be minimised to the extent that they do not create a "bad system".
In the film The Matrix, the Architect describes that the system has gone through a number of iterations; none of them perfect but converging towards some optimal goal.
Apart from changing a few obvious parameters, the Steem economy has not seen significant iterations. And as we have seen, those parameters are not sufficient to change the economy; they have merely changed the profitability of bad actors. "Bad", as always, refers to the tendency of a system to converge towards some fixed point whereby bad actors become significant.