its very difficult to come to an objective stance on "what is a quality post". If a meme makes me laugh, it's hard not to vote. If I'm stoked that a pregnant mother joined the platform, I'll upvote. What has "value" to me, may not have "value"...so there is always going to be people who feel like the trending post isn't the highest quality.
I think a cool way to stop the "bandwagoning" would be to have blind votes and payout being displayed after vote + getting the vote buttons out of the index pages and leave the vote only once people actually visit the blogpost.
But that is all UI stuff I am sure will come sooner or later.
Hey you're not alone. If something makes me laugh then it gets a vote too. It is highly subjective. I was just referring to using bots and the issue of plagiarised content. If you don't actually read a post then your not doing any quality assessment.
I agree that these things will eventually get ironed out until they are at least "good enough" if not some other copycat network will come along that does it better and gets it right. (The same way that Facebook took over from Myspace, Bebo, Orkut etc.)