This Post: 
@buildawhale's vote on the $900+ post:
The vote came in 2 and a half hours after the this post was submitted.
Personally, I think the majority of 'Trending' is utter crap, whether the poster has paid to advertise or not.
Members should know by now that this is not the place to find quality and engaging content.
The vote was placed yesterday 24th of feb 2018, Asher :-)
Too sad. It's the page everybody visits who comes from the outside, not being logged in to steemit.
I guess that brings us back to the main question: how can we make sure, this place doesn't become a cheap merchandising platform, that tells everybody it was about valuable content and higher ideals like freedom?
If something is not done, pay to play upvote bots will be the beginning of the end of Steemit. Why the Frack will people spend time and energy creating valuable thought provoking content, if you can just post BS and pay to get it trending?
It's all very sad. Make me reconsider whether I really would like to post my novel here. Maybe I should just start gaming the system too.
Oh yeah, that pesky conscience of mine.
Seems to me this along with the problem of one or two rich in Steem Power being able to flag someone into the ground is a fundamental problem with the Steemit system which they will need to find a solution for.
The whole thing Bitcoin was solving, essentially, is the same sort of issue here. Where you didn't need people to cooperate or "trust" them . This will probably not be able to solved quite that elegantly but it will need to be approached in the same way. You have to assume people will try and game the system you can't expect people to just not exploit it and hope the problem will go away. You might as well say why bother with verifying Bitcoin transactions people should just not try and cheat anyone.
As far as the potentiality for censorship goes this alone is potentially worse than YouTube, since at least it is only You Tube that can make those decisions. In fact more dislikes actually could still be GOOD for you and people who knew this would say if you didnt like it still downvote the video! This is because the system didnt care if you didnt like it just that people were watching. Not here on Steemit.
I'm literally put off posting content in case it's too "controversial" it will anger someone with a powerful vote who decides to ruin all my hard work I put into it and that's assuming they decide to stop with just that one piece. It only needs one person and they can overrule a hundred or more others. It doesn't even need to be controversial, just not to their tastes. Seems to me all memes should not be considered for rewards at all to be consistent here and yet there's another whole external website just for Steemit memes!
I've seen people praising flagging Trevon James into the ground but they really shouldn't be so happy it was so easy to do that. Whose idea was it to decide you could only either upvote something or flag it which makes no distinction between reporting it for terrorism, child porn or you just didn't like it? It will only get worse the more Steemit starts taking more of the market from the reddit and Youtube type platforms.
It may take Steemit competition to show a different way, as well as actually potentially show they could be a real risk of taking market share from Steemit, to actually get the problem solved. I do think there's a solution, but clearly this whole aspect is a major flaw they didn't account for.
I think there could be many solutions. But for finding solutions, you first have to realize that there's a problem. I guess we will need a far bigger flag wars for that.
True, but next you also need to know what the problem is, otherwise one could just as well be making it worse.
Flagging is not the solution it's not a solution at all, especially when the flagging system is itself one of the problems.
The problem in my eyes is the drama going on and the way how people see Steemit. Is it a social media platform, a blogging platform or a promotion platform? Maybe it's all of that. But the frontend isn't made for all of that. I also don't like flagging. But there seems to be no other way, unless they change something.
Oh yes, my apologies!
It is sad, the trending page is misleading to passers by in so many ways.
My question is, what would be the best content to have sitting at the top of Trending for those visiting steemit.com for the first time?
No problem at all.
Keeping it as diverse as possible I guess. My new trending page is @curie's voting list :-) They discover a lot of great content.
Definitely an option!
@carlgnash and co will be very happy to hear that!
It looks fairly diverse, if you go by main tag?
Enjoy your holidays! Please bring us back some fresh and diverse content, thank you! :D
Thanks for the tip. New here. I have, after a little more than a week, begun to discount the Trending page. I'm more comfortable on the New page, because then I get to choose what I like and not what other people like. However, briefly checked out @curie and it seems to have interesting material highlighted. I think Steemit is great. There may be flaws, but I've never been in any circumstance that was perfect. In the short time I've been here, I've run into a lot of positive voices. I've learned about plants in Australia and magnetars. I can find a way to be comfortable on a diverse platform like Steemit. Of course, I am new, and eager. I love to write and find this forum prompts me to do that. I'm spending way too much time here. :)
If anyone hasn't yet, they should vote Curie for witness.
It's one of the last great hopes for Steemit.
Well said :-)
I may have gotten myself in trouble tonight. Sorta lost my internal "don't say that" guy. :P Hopefully my rep doesn't suffer to much.
For promoting Curie? I don't know how this could have any negative consequences for you rep? It should be the other way around :-)
Fixing the trending page would be fairly simple thing to do sort of:
But then you would get people saying that I think my content is worthy of my vote, if it is not worthy of my vote why would it be worthy to someone else. Also you would get, vote bots are allowed and available why should I not be able to be on the trending page just because I bought a vote. And then what I hear from all the people that want to keep using vote bots, "you can't tell them from real people, and if you did away with them then you would just have people getting more names and false accounts to upvote themselves.
I would bet that almost every individual that has responded to this post with a REP of more than 62 has used one or more vote bots. I would hazard a guess that more than 85% of the people with reps of 62 or more on steemit have used a vote bot on a post or two. So the problem will likely never go away.
That probably explains it, as I thought I checked as I don't typically just say things for the fun of it. Thanks for clearing it up.
Only now i've checked the trending posts ;) Be well mate.