Perhaps a limit on how long something could be in tending would be better. Trash or not they can’t keep buying themselves to the top on the same blog for three straight days in a row or longer by overspending. 12 hour time limit. After that the blog is no longer up there. We live in a very short time and fast moving site. It’s a little odd things hang in trending for days on end.
Otherwise, I fear it will just be the same old same old. Everything here is based on vesting. Those “curators” will be put in by vesting totals as that how everything is done. A lot of the top is into vote selling and as a result they have the powers to put those who share their viewpoints into power.
The community as a whole needs another way. The issue here is everyone has different options on what should be in trending. For many anything that is not programing related that is not a new app or update announcement for their programs they are running here is not adding value to the platform and therefore should never be in trending.
Best I could think of. The top 10 tags each should each have someone who represents them and there interest to bring forward every day blogs that are worthy of being on trending. Each person would than put forth a Curation Announcement of their intentions to be a tags leader. Every quarter the top 10 tags are recalculated. There would also be term limits within x amount of time.
Even this has its massive drawbacks. Instead I would rather focus on tags and whenever communities come out to avoided the current trending issues. On top of that I think Steemit should find a more clever way to either have the front of steemit change every time you refresh it to show one of the top ten tags and its trending list or have a way to customize what mix of tags are in your trending. As far as those not logged into the site I’m not sure if it would become economy viable for steemit to have top trending results be relatable to the person who is landing on that front page.
Other method is simply allow steemit inc control and who and what is in trending. Hand pick like many other sites really do. Than you run into issues like twitter or YouTube where they have a bigger hand then most realize on what is “trending.”
I just don’t see an easy solution that won’t over time become corrupted. If we moved off liner rewards and back onto the old system it would at least be cheaper voting power wise to as a collative remove the junk off trending. There is one piece right now up there that many have down voted. The person can easer outspend and the brainless masses will keep upvoting it. This is also very subjective. As who am I to say what should or not be on trending? Why that what my vesting share are for. As such I have no impact on what goes there or not.