totally love this concept! when i first joined steemit, of course i went to the trending page like everyone else. i thought there must be something special about the people there. i didn't understand the system yet. as i read their posts, i was like some of this isn't even good- this site must be easy to make money on.. .lol! that's pretty funny. so it's incredibly misleading, too, to show people what steemit is all about as most look at the trending page first. the best posts are found in our feeds, by the quality content producers we choose to follow.
i check individual tags to find content i'm interested in and usually prefer HOT over trending as that dictates more people's choices rather than $$.. it's actually a more valid way to gauge what posts people are actually interested in. I say do away with trending. it's scammed and gamed and shows the same people over and over. Make the HOT tag the main tag that's shows. Newbies and other quality content creators who don't have whale followers or tons of SP will actually get seen more!! <3
I’m not sure I would want to show hot over trending. I like hot too but it only shows posts that are very new, so i think trending is better overall since it lets you see posts from the past few days. For those of us who are on here all the time the posts on trending might be old news, but more casual users will probably miss a lot if hot was the default.
I suggest you try our app https://oneplace.media for content discovery by tags. Although we currently use trending to form our tags feed we plan to later let the users decide if they want to see trending or hot.