Yeah. I wonder how much refusing the payout discourages people upvoting it. I know plenty of people still do it, and some of their posts have received much higher, too. Everyone should really be following steemitblog anyway, so the trending page becomes moot, especially when they've denied payout.
I'm hoping that what you say about the hivemind/communities deal happens exactly how you describe it, but in that hivemind update you mentioned, they had the ability to create community bots listed. Do you know what that's supposed to mean? There's also supposed to be the capability of creating bot trackers, so it kind of sounds like they're heading towards bot institutionalization rather than away from it.
Maybe it's a community bot that goes around hiding posts that use other bots? 😁
I'm not sure to be honest, but one would hope they are to aid and not the opposite.
That would be awesome in my opinion. My concern, and I'm sure I don't have a clue at all about this, is that it will essentially put pressure on every community to offer some kind of bot that will provide some level of support for their members. Or, it could be the means by which the moderators or owners of the community accounts get some measure of compensation. Or both? I don't know. It just seems like a step in the opposite direction of where I would like to see it all go. :)
I hope, and suspect the community bots will not be for individuals to push their content to the top. More will hopefully he revealed soon.
Now, I must start the weekly curation league post :)