I agree wholeheartedly. Understand that platforms like Reddit and Facebook and Instagram have people on there actively gaming the algorithms either for the lulz or because they want to get something to trend hard to get themselves karma (that is literally the job for digital media marketing people). On Steemit this is exacerbated by the fact that you have direct financial incentive to do that. On other platforms, something going viral increases the visibility and gets your thing known, which along several steps may lead to money going into your coffers. On Steemit it's a lot more direct, just the fact that something is trending itself is a big bonus for you. I mean look at this thread, it's worth 779 SBD (no offense OP lol, you made good observations here and it's definitely a good thread). Like dude, even professional journalists don't get paid that much for an article (HINT HINT, professional journalists), so it's completely natural to assume that people are going to want to exploit the system hardcore.

On the other hand you have people who see the dollars and think "right on! I can actually get paid for making the things I love!!", who then find themselves barely seen at all because of people making abuse of the system the norm. So rather than spending time thinking up cool new creative stuff, they are pressured into thinking up schemes to game the system just to get noticed, let alone actually make decent money. I find myself in that situation already, and honestly I would rather not go down that cynical, miserable path.

I think ways around that would be to work on visibility of posts. Right now I think the window of exposure between new, hot and trending is a bit out of whack. For instance, I have barely any followers. If I post something, it will be in new for maybe 5 minutes until it's utterly buried under other posts. In 10 minutes no one is going to see it. The feed helps, at least then you have the option to see only who you follow and can check out their new stuff. If you're feeling extra supportive you can look into SteemAuto and set up auto curation and curation trails - itself VERY easy to exploit, but in the positive sense it's kind of like Patreon where you decide you will support this person for the time being, regardless of whether you're on the computer reading things every day or not.

I honestly can't wait for Communities feature (I think it's called) to arrive, that makes it possible to split the site into groups kind of like Subreddits. I don't like tags, and I dislike Instagram for the same reason. It's because everyone tag spams like crazy, and there's barely any reason not to (ESPECIALLY when downvoting basically doesn't exist, or is far too severe a punishment for something like that). At any point a user can claim ignorance or misunderstanding, or say well this is a video and it's under "video" so wtf is your problem? The groups would help so much with that because it would be basically like separate feeds. Likewise it would be possible also to have more refined tag searches and filtering, so for instance you want to search for tags a b c d together only, or just one, or maximum number of tags, or filter out tags and so forth. Because since there is money involved, you can't really fault people for eyeing up a popular tag and try to shoehorn their stuff into their somehow. Instead of the process being "I make xyz, I would like to find a place where xyz would actually be seen and people like it and are grateful for it".

But yes indeed it's a bit sad that visibility functions so badly, and that you do really need to game it to get your new stuff into trending somehow or hot (what is the difference between the two?). I think this is similar to how Reddit started, where there was also just one "subreddit" i.e. reddit.com. Like one global feed. When you add thousands of active posters to that it's only natural that it gets overwhelming (like are you willing to sift through 100+ posts every day just to find the one you like?) and that it needs to be more refined somehow.

The other important thing for users right now in absence of any structural change, is to be critical of who they follow - make your decision and then vote on their posts! If you don't like them, don't follow! It hurts seeing your posts languish at 0 when you actually have followers, you can't help but feel betrayed by your own fans.