I agree that the trending tab is pure crap for the most part. I did a post about this maybe a month ago. My suggestion is to make a truly organic trending tab the disqualifies anyone from showing up who uses voting bots. If you use voting bots you should show up under promoted. Also, I’d like to see a notification such as “sponsored” to be easily visible to let everyone know votes have been purchased to promote the post. I’m not against vote buying, we just need more transparent disclosure and sorting. Thanks for the post!
All of your ideas you present here are good ones, and old ones. In conversations with top witnesses, and Stinc, I have seen them handwaved away and brushed off. There's a reason for this, and it isn't given, so we have to make our best guess.
Here's some information which can inform your best guess as to why the system is the way it is today. Almost all the stake in Steem that exists was mined before Steemit, or any other front ends, were public. Almost all upvote bots buy delegations from those mined stakes, or are run by those accounts directly, which makes upvote bots and delegations the primary mechanism that produces ROI for whales. 35 of them control the vast majority of Steem extant.
Stinc and the top witnesses are dependent on that stake. Witness votes are stake-weighted, so the whales control the witnesses, and Stinc's market is those whales, who have all the Steem.
Transparent disclosure and sorting is a threat to whales profits, so how likely is it for Stinc and the top witnesses to make that happen?
It's not by mistake that the system is the way it is now.
Thanks!
Maybe someone can make a Front End steemit website implementing this suggestion (like mspsteem or busy.org), I don't think it's that hard for a professional.
The only problem is technically no one gets paid to do that type of stuff directly.The may get votes and in turn make more money, but not directly. To have a dedicated team, in my opinion someone has to be taking a cut of the payouts like DTube at 25%. This way incentives are directly aligned across the board. Steemit was and is a proof of concept. What I’m concerned with is what happens to Steem Power when other platforms using SMTs take off and Steemit.com may not? Steem Power is a direct investment into STEEM. If SMTs do well then I would assume STEEM is doing well...which means my Steem Power is doing well. But, where do I access my Steem Power, STEEM and SBD outside of Steemit.com? Any thoughts?
I didn't think that far... I never thought of this problem SMT can make, though only if Steemit was the in the lower end of popularity between the STEEM sites right?
If that happened, wouldn't STEEM be like the Bitcoin to Altcoins now? Used more than store value and "a price base" than it's initial use as currency.
I don’t think it takes away the allure to tap into STEEMs daily inflation payouts. Steemit might be an easy way for a community to tap into to the cash flow without having to do much. Why mess with that? I’m not sure if all STEEM based apps would go away to start their own SMT. But, I almost have to believe the way it works would be that your Steem Power is accepted across the board. So any app that doesn’t do a SMT will use your current stake of Steem Power to determin your influence on the site. The only way to avoid the current entrenched whale voting groups from influencing your audience and content, you have to create a SMT. Still a lot of confusion there for me, but I’m trying to get a better grasp in it over the coming months. Thanks for the comment!
Which is what happened over a year ago when they introduced promoted posts. People got pissed, and didn't want them in their feed competing. But, somehow, there hasn't been as much of an outcry over this.