Well, when you come to a site and look at trending and most viewed posts, you expect to see the "best" content, or at least something that approximates that.

But if you look at that particular post, it has an entry level "rep", it's the only post on the account that was created just this month, it has essentially no votes to speak of and those votes are weightless, so how does such a thing not only become the top post on the explore section, but linger there for days on end - which is what in turn got it even more views from the curious, not because its "quality content" but simply because it's almost unavoidable to see it and naturally people here would want to know what about it caused it to get any attention at all. Which perpetuated it.

It's an odd anomaly basically. New users who don't have a ton of people they follow are naturally going to use "explore" options to begin their journey here and that's what we're showing them? It's just... weird AF, simple as that.

How did it ever get there in the first place? A zero day user, with no followers or follows, no votes, no other content. That's not how this is supposed to work at all.

Further, if it IS supposed to work that way, how come all the folks with similar new stats but posting legitimate non-spam content are NOT getting up there? See the paradox there?

And thanks for the welcome! It's great to be back amongst friends and foes and having fun on the platform again, but its also surreal how the landscape of people has both completely changed and at the same time, somehow completely stayed exactly the same!