This is a great article!
I agree with the 'don't upvote the trending'. From my feeling it seems as if most people only click on the trending page. On the one hand because it heralds the potential of receiving a high upvote, on the other hand because there is still this conditioned belief that quality is a matter of money success. Of course quality lies in the eye of the beholder..
After having been here for three weeks now I still think that there is a slight oversensitivity on Steemit as to what can be considered spam and what not.
Especially in a few years when Steemit will be having its heyday the number of people posting only "I like this post" will increase dramatically, and getting a handle on it by flagging all of them would be quite some work and also scare away many new users.
As you say "community spirit". I think there many users who go through trial and error and are castigated too prematurely.
What I personally don't like in addition to the begging for followers etc, is when people choose headlines which only want to to lure the reader, for example by capitalizing all letters and adding more than one exclamation mark etc..
Thank you!
I can understand that many are hoping to receive a high upvote from an author of a post on the trending page, but usually it's too late for that. The author is busy, and they have many comments- they can only get to so many per day. I understand that- I am almost to the point where comments are overwhelming me. I am spending about an hour a day just responding to comments on my posts. But look at it this way- one day I will have too many comments to get to all of them. So I can see how an author of a trending post will respond to the comments that come in up to an hour after the post is published. Then they begin work on their next article, but their trending post is trending for two days. All those commentors hoping for a whale upvote are wasting their time at that point. They should go read and comment on that authors most recently published post- they will have a better chance of being noticed :)