I love the idea - we need some changes because the current system just isnt working and people are getting fed up! I havent used the flags for a number of reasons - 1 - I dont have enough SP to make much of a difference and 2 - fear of retribution as you mentioned.
In this case I like the idea of being anonymous - I dont want to start fights I just dont want to see 'nice post' on everything that I post!
I agree I think maybe we should have a trending and then an 'organic trending' where there is an algorithm to subtract any upvotes that have been paid for. I think having this would allow the best content to gain exposure organically while if people still want to promote thought bots then they can still get to the trending page.
I think this is in esscence what Steemit planned - the promote page was for paid promoted posts and trending was for content that had gained alot of attention.
Unfortunaly with all the bots around we are still far away from coming up with a solid solution
The current system is definitely broken, wholeheartedly agree. The flagging functionality is all but unusable (unless you're a heavy power user on Steemit and your flag counts), I am not even sure what it is intended for when it can be abused by heavy-hitters, like the war between @haejin and @berniesanders where there has been some flag brigading between the two in their content war.
An organic trending page makes so much sense, I could see it working by using some time calculation in combination with a list of known bots. The problem with bots is that they seem to be popping up at a high rate, I see new ones every day.
A good solution might be to analyse an authors wallet history. Most bots work on the premise of sending SBD and putting the link to the post as the memo message. If you could build a natural trending section that automatically excluded any post that has been mentioned in a transaction (only by the author) you might be able to do it.
I dont know much about the fagging war your referring to but I can imagine how it went down.
Yeah most of the bots go through Steembottracker so I guess we would have to somehow link the organic trending page to that where ot would pull the data from who has upvoted what with bots.
Its worth thinking about - I wish I had some knowledge of HTML etc etc then I could be a bit more technical about it all