Each of those can be good things or bad things, depending on your values system. That's the central point of the post... good or bad depends on your values system, but the actual outcomes depend on the values systems of the critical stakeholders.
A system that does not appropriately align incentives, but instead depends on the goodness of the parties involved, is doomed to result in outcomes considered horrible by those designing the system.
isn't this all about getting rid of all these 70/80-ish reputation accounts that just push out the most repetitive low effort content bid-botted to $100-200 daily without any repercussions?!
The system designed assumes that key stakeholders will bear the social costs and 'clean up' the trending list... by making it more expensive to trend content, while making it cheaper to downvote content. But there are no incentives built in to ensure that, only an assumption that enough people will bear the social cost to bring about the targeted results.
Even though paying to Trend content will be more expensive than it is now, it will be more profitable relative to non-promoted content than it is now. None of the promotion services will disappear... they will simply reprice and become even more powerful or influential than ever.
Mark it... in the latest analysis I have seen, bid-bots control less than 15% of the reward pool. If the EIP goes through that will exceed 20% (and probably be closer to 30%) within a year of the fork.