Yes I do find those trending pages annoying, thankfully if I stick to my feed I can blinker myself to them. My life is very much improved in quality without bot user extraordinaire @joeparys (for example) in my face.
It certainly can't have a positive affect on the appalling attrition rate of this platform. And that's a lose-lose situation for all of us.
We have authors making ~10 posts per day, and use bid bots to reap rewards on all of them.. And that's not good. I don't mind if someone use a bid bot on a few posts and with a reasonable amount of money. But spending 100 sbd on votes from several bots on the same article is nuts and bad for the community.
No it's not! Although thankfully I'm oblivious to that extreme abuse. I'm going to write something about this later today.... I was inspired into a suitable analogy after my gym session yesterday.