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.
This sounds kind of silly to me, if it’s terrible for users why should we leave it as is?
It currently displays the rewards in USD (although with the assumption that 1 SBD = 1 USD) and it does show that some posts can earn a lot of money. I just think it would be better to let users easily see posts in categories they are interested in.
Because it's not really a useful page to normal users, but it's a funny page to see who has the biggest voting circle or who has invested the most into voting bots, and if anything looks abusive it gets dealt with by the community a bit faster than it otherwise would if there wasn't a trending page. It also must be at least a slight ego boost to those who finally land on it to see themselves up there, and we all know that stroking the ego is a big reason why money is so desired in the first place.
If the SBD wasn't assumed to be 1 USD and it actually displayed the correct ultimate fiat payout amount then we would have perhaps drawn even more (of possibly the wrong kind of) attention these past few months if people were to come in and see the absolutely insane valuations on posts.
I don't disagree about letting people see what they actually want to see and find, I don't think the trending page should be the first page people see, I'm saying that we can have other pages but still leave the biggest hitters trending page somewhere for people who are interested in seeing that kind of stuff.