How are you going to tackle this from the source? I'm sure you have also read @schattenjaeger's most recent post on why he's leaving the platform.
As long as people are able to buy votes, I do not really see how this can be fixed by the community. It's like whack-a-mole, you downvote 5 posts and 10 new ones pop up...
I'm not saying that people should just accept this reality, but better solutions need to be found.
Just from a personal perspective, I'd hate to spend my time and effort in a platform that will just end up dying because artificially upvoted crap rules the trending section.
I'd be willing to delegate some of my very limited SP for a good cause btw.
buying votes is small potatoes ... the bigger issue is the plagiarism and copy/paste going on.
The whales should be joining bernie going after the bigger idiots but the rest of the community could be helping projects like @submarine and @steemcleaners clean up the plagiarism and copy/paste
Excellent comment, I was thinking this too. Thanks for mentioning @shsttenjaeger 's post.
With the way things are right now, tackling at the source is not possible. I think the whales here forgot about what's in the original whitepaper, which is a shame.
Yes, it's a never-ending battle, but it's one that needs to be fought if Steem is to survive given nobody is making any worthwhile updates to the blockchain itself.
I just wish that Steemit would make it easier and more fun to do proper manual curation.
Currently the way everything is displayed on the Steemit website isn't really supportive of good manual curation. More filtering options would be great and better community highlights would be a nice addition.
But can't trending algorithms be changed at the condenser level? Trending. That's really what the whole bot voting thing comes down to isn't it? If the site developers could come up with a better trending algorithm, and showcase better content on the main pages, it would drive more users to Steem. Mind you, I'm not saying do anything with the rewards. Whales upvotes, self-votes and all that would still work...which would make abuse less noticeable, so there would have to be some brainstorming on a solution for that. I don't know. I'm just throwing out ideas.
The same thing could happen for rep which sucks currently. One person, no matter how powerful, should be able to totally silence or otherwise affect the reputation of another. This is a main factor that kept minnows from joining the fight as well. It could be totally changed at the condenser level...in fact it already is a function of the condenser, based on info from the blockchain.
I've thought that TRENDING should maybe only show the top trending post of 1 per person MAX. That way the system can't be gamed. More people's trending post would get to appear on it. Not just @Haejin's garbage.
This implies identity verification for participation on a block-chain and most people are against that for various good reasons. Correct me if I am wrong on this. I would like to be.
Well at least 1 per steemit account which I was kind of trying to say. Something like that. Have a max number of post a user can have trending at a certain time.
No Abuse?
So, the three other accounts that voted up your comments would be able to get to the trending page too? Don't you think that is gaming the system as well?
I think this is a hard problem.
The Tragedy of the Commons
Many users do not know what is considered wrong behavior for the platform. There is a tragedy of the commons problem where every user can get more utility by up-voting themselves (either directly or through alt-accounts). We would benefit more as a group in finding better content if we all would vote articles according to article quality. Those that do not vote for themselves are fools that get less and less utility and thus become poorer and poorer.
Flagging people with very large stakes to that vote themselves have problems
How do you know how to map accounts to people? (An answer bittrex memo codes). Votes can be bought and so how do you determine which were bought when votes can be bought (out of band: another altcoin, or fiat)
Flagging can also be abuse
Is it right to flag all of the posts because of what a user wrote in one? This is flag abuse. Or flagged because she is the wife of Jerry Banfield.
Are there any blockchain updates in particular that you'd like to see to help address this? or changes that you think have caused it to be worse now than previously? Getting the economic incentives right seems nearly impossible to me.