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.^^