Hey @metama I actually really like your idea of showing a limited amount of sponsored content that's paid, but everything else IMHO should be 100% organic what gets to the top. I know people will always find a way to game the system and I'm sure creating an algorithm resistant to that would be a huge challenge.
I get what you mean about follow content creators you enjoy and ignore hot and trending but in that case what's the point of having a hot and trending? To me the hot and trending should be the best of the best or most interesting content and in reality its the worst content. Maybe we get rid of the hot and trending tab and just go chronologically, we'll still have garbage content on there but at least its a level playing field at that point. To me whats really bad is when someone new comes to the platform they are going to be immediately turned off by it.
Another thing, is Steemits search function is pretty horrible which means its hard to find content that appeals to you. There's people I discover on here on a regular basis who I'm like shit I love this guys content, why did it take me a year to find him.
Also ultimately I think what we all want is more adoption overall, and not only more adoption but right now pretty much everyone on here is a creator, I think we want to get more people on here who are consumers of content so were all not just talking at each other trying to get our message out. Right now the environment is not appealing at all to someone who would be comming here to read or watch content. Your average person would abandon this site visit within 10 seconds most and go back to youtube, medium, etc
As far as bid bots go, I'll be honest I don't fully understand Steemits algorithm, how bid bots work, etc despite having been on here over a year, I've just never really cared enough to dig into all the stats and figure that out . I'm comming at this more from a larger picture of I see what they are doing to Steemit, I feel like they create an imbalance of power and I think they cuase people to game the system as opposed to creating quality content and having it organically rise to the top so to speak.