Trendthis was started before Ned sold Steem Inc in order to try and get content onto the landing page of Steemit which wasn't burnpost, sbdpotato or other steem or crypto related things, because as important as those things were and the good they were doing, they made no sense to someone new to Steem. The impression people would get is that you can only make any real headway if you knew all about Steem and the blockchain and that was an impression we wanted to change.
In order to do this, we have to forget about whether this will profit us directly and alter our usual voting patterns to say, "this deserves to be seen." I guarantee you that I don't do it to profit, it's not worth the effort trying to find and read through that content. In fact, most of the content I put forward doesn't even get selected for the push to trending, just a few extra votes. The benefit I hope to get from it is a future for Hive which brings in more content creators and consumers.
It was working on Steem before everything turned to crap. We were getting a good variety of genres on the front page of Steem. As I write this, here is a snapshot of the trending page of Hive:
One post Covid19 related and the rest is Hive or crypto reated. Not exactly inviting to a broad range of content creators and consumers.
The discord is open to everyone, certainly not a backroom for deals. We try to answer questions and give a guideline of the quality of content were looking for.