I definitely agree that **Trending** and **Hot** are useless. About the only category they are useful for browsing is #contest and their usefulness is limited even there. **New** is slightly more useful but, like you said, full of junk. 

Something I've though about working on, after I complete my current downvote bot project, is to create an mute list with SteemConnect to let you mute all the spammers on a blacklist with minimal effort. Don't know how many people would use it, but it might be useful.

Right now though, I mainly upvote content in my feed since I try to keep it to stuff I'm interested in or original authors that need support. Most users in it come from my infrequent browsing of the feed or Discord users I meet.

I don't think the current site is where Steemit needs to be heading. I'd like to see more projects built on top of it like Utopian, dTube, and dLive. I think that is where Steem's potential lies. I'd personally love a chat room where you could upvote messages

That said, Steemit is around to stay and I think that as time goes on and more quality users join the platform, we will be able to reduce spam. Most spam accounts can be flagged into oblivion with concentrated effort. The whales that abuse the system are much harder to stop. Our only hope there is to get some good whales that contribute to the platform instead of exploiting it.

Just my rambling thoughts 😉

Great info once again from the visionary @greer184!  Thanks for the effort and excellence on a whole other level.  I am putting q-filter hashtag on my posts until I am asked to discontinue doing so.  I love the discord and commentary.

The nice thing is that the bid bots can't keep up with subsidizing crap content with a ten steem dollar attached to it.  The losses on there are quite staggering, the value in them are getting absolutely sucked up much faster than I had ever seen in my short three months here.  Bots are showing no value in placing a bid over 40 minutes out from when the timer expires, relatively close when the vote is cast.  The crap posts have flooded the market which is both good and bad from the perspective of generating more of an elite level of posting, lol, which I am not saying I am in by any means.  Low effort may be a better way to describe a crap post I guess.

Yesterday, I thought about ways of how to improve the feed. I usually ignore the trending and hot categories because as you write, it's about what whales like and about who's paying the most to the bots. So, not really interesting. 

The only good category is the new one, because that's where you don't have the money bias in. Instead there is about 80% BS that you have to filter out first, but then you can find interesting content. (Strangely, I still have about the same share of stuff I don't need in my feed. None of my unfollow purges helped so far...)

A system level approach to fix the content filter problem is out of the question. The people in charge aren't interested in an improvement. That's why I thought into the direction of topic bots that only resteem articles that have for example as their first tag "politics". In this category the bot would resteem  everything, except maybe one of the other tags is one of the notorious spam signals like "dmania" or "colorchallenge".  Also important is the language of the articles that get resteemed. You could name that bot @resteem-en-politics, which resteems politics articles in English. Another one could be named @resteem-en-sports which is doing the same with sports. And one could be named @resteem-de-deutsch, @resteem-en-philosophy, @resteem-es-php etc.

All topics could get their own bot and these bots do nothing else but resteeming a single topic in a single language. What you as a user have to do is to follow that bot and you exclusively get content of your liking into your feed. 

I think that would be the most simple and efficient solution. Maybe there could be combined bots where two specific tags are necessary to thin out the amount, if that is necessary (e.g. @resteem-en-sports+racing).(I don't know how many  articles are produced daily per category, but that should be added as information so you know how many posts to expect.)

Plus of course a blacklist for spammers and scammers.

The programming for that I believe is very simple:
- select a specific tag(s)
- exclude specific tags
- select the correct language
- exclude spammers and scammers
- resteem the selected articles

If you do it right, I guess per language the average user would follow about 20-30 of these bots, of which everyone resteems perhalps about 5 posts per day. This wouldn't be more than the daily output of a big online news outlet.

The biggest problem is how to acquire all these accounts, because you need different phone numbers and IP addresses since the developers try to limit the number of accounts to one per person. So effectively, you'd have to talk to the developers and get their approval - something which could prove to be impossible.

Other biggest problems of Steemit are as I think the reward pool rape by the big bots as I described it in a recent post and the gap between witnesses&developers to the real world and their sheer ignorance, greed and incompetence. This must change and I intend to create an account for which I will collect as many votes for witnesses as possible. With that I will try to pressure them into the direction of more quality, more professionalism, more transparency and more work. Too many witnesses are lazy and just ripping off the system. Either they improve or they won't get a vote. At least theoretically, that should work.^^

I have talked a lot about the [problems](https://steemit.com/steemit/@edicted/fixing-steemit-with-baby-steps-part-3-resteeming) of Steemit and how to fix them.  Everything about this platform revolves around investors and it is so absolutely unnecessary and unproductive at this point.  

My post about [improved filters](https://steemit.com/steemit/@edicted/fixing-steemit-with-baby-steps-part-2-improved-filters) directly addresses this issue.  Tracking average payouts could help us.  

If a whale makes an average of $500 per post and they have a post that's paying out $250, is this 'hot' or 'trending'?  No, it's probably garbage, but that didn't stop it from getting massively more exposure than it should have.  

Posts in 'hot' and 'trending' should get there from a combination of getting paid out more than average, making sure the author isn't spamming posts, upvotes by confirmed unique accounts that the community trusts, and straight up luck (lottery).  

Unfortunately this site's only metric for trust are money and a laughable flagging system where people like @berniesanders have -17 reputation.  These measures of trust are hilariously embarrassing and we the community should be doing everything in our power to implement more intelligent dynamic systems for our online mini-government.

Did you ever try a version of your filter that actually makes all votes worth the same? I always wondered what that would like like. Of course if that was the criteria the nature of the bots might change. Might be even better though. Or even things like comments (spam filtered).

Are the hot and trending sections in the core blockchain code? Hum. I never bother to check that. Curious.... I'll see if I can verify that right now or find the right reference to it...

Steemit’s biggest issue is that Steem Inc. isn’t interested in developing Steemit as a high quality platform. It’s both by design and by lack of interest (read: they are too vested to be the dominant long term player/interface of Steem).

Steemit is the initial **centralized** roll-out platform to bring eyeballs to the blockchain. Nothing more, nothing less.

Beyond that, one could even wonder whether Steem Inc. have what it takes to take the Steem ecosystem, with all its issues, to the next level.

So far we know that they don’t have what it takes to launch the long promised, and emphasized at SteemFest to be ready last year, communities. Same applies to the iOS app.

Somewhere, the issue is that there is a conflict between conflict of interest and desire to go full-out on Steemit. Given how vested Steem Inc. and top level employees are, that’s an entirely understandable ambiguity to struggle with.

> Thus, the front page "trending" and "hot" pages represent the content that large stakeholders find interesting, not the content that the community or sub-groups within the community find interesting. Essentially, the opinion of the rich is the only opinion that really matters since articles are organized simply by the amount of stakeholder support that backs them.

And that's how it will remain, as it has been since the beginning, unless people want and agree to change how they vote, or how the voting system works. Quality isn't of much concern for many, I've been mocked for talking about the importance of quality, and those posts that mocked me got big payouts because many power players don't care and don't want quality information. The consciousness of people needs to change for the behavior to change, and that's not likely going to happen. Those with power want to use their power the way they want, and don't want to lose how they want to personally influence the site, regardless of how different behavior can help to improve and make Steemit more attractive.

I keep coming back to your wall for I know I can expect some valuable log and not a hoax. Having said that I do feel Whales have a responsibility to filter what's promoted in order to maintain quality here also trending and new doesn't really justify the attention. 

I personally look for my favorite tag (as per mood) and try replying to new accounts with good content. That's my way of paying back to steemit.