Great post and I appreciated your old post on calculating vote payout. We've used ur info in our new app @SteemSmarter.
"I still think there should be a “trending” page for each specific tag showing the highest pending payout posts for that tag."
We plan to implement this in a weekly report and I agree with you that being able to easily sort by tags and find the tags where your community is engaging is a much better system. Only following people has it's limitations since (even I) will write about all sorts of random stuff as I blog my life and thoughts.
Also, love the idea of being able to search for multiple tags like "photography" + "animals". I believe we'll be able to roll out similar reports for linked and related tags as well, but we currently have no plans for building a front end interface (like Busy.org or Steemit.com) which I believe would be needed.
Keep up the good work :)
I think we should leave the trending page as-is, as terrible as it is from an actual users' perspective, if it were to display the payout amount in a visitor's native currency in FIAT I think it would still serve as a huge draw just by showing some of the max potential payouts the platform can deliver on.
But as far as user experience goes steemit is terrible by design, by making everything about money and none of it about content it really pushes the idea that you need SP to have any say on the platform, which is both why it's had limited success to this day and why anyone ever invested money in the platform. I think if we went with a larger vision we could go further, but that's just me.
Don't know why we can't just have a column that's just based on number of votes, not accounting for vote strength.
And yes, communities aka subs should change things up.