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I'm not ignorant - Everybody is free to do that, and everybody who can does it for ROI. Are you downvoting everyone who buys votes? Or only the ones why buy enough to make it on trending? When was the last time you saw a post trending that didn't buy large votes?

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I can understand people buying votes to get exposure on the tags and maybe make a small gain in ROI.

What I do not condone are people who buy votes to get straight onto trending. The trending page is the front page to new users and visitors, some of them may want to invest in Steem. This page should have the best content. The only way to have the best content is for the community to vote it onto that page. An advertisement earning over $500 creates an awful impression. People argue that it's bought votes and not what they are earning. How the hell is a potential investor going to know let alone understand that?

P.S. I'm not calling you ignorant, I am making reference to your comment.

Then - and this has been discussed and criticized a lot - the mechanism for Trending is obviously faulty. If you can buy into it and that's not intended, then it shouldn't depend on large votes. Now, for the nature of the Steem ecosystem, we have to live with (large) bots as they provide ROI for their investors and customers. I understand your frustration regarding high-quality content on Trending (and generally), but:

  1. There are more fundamental changes needed to get this fixed (see e.g. @steem-ua)
  2. I don't think any potential investors care about whether or not Trending articles have been bought or not or by the overall "quality" of the content. In contrast, it may even be interesting for investors to see that you can actually use the token they're investing in to buy extra visibility, which may be what they want, or they may be interested in utilities for Steem.

That said, you're obviously free to downvote whatever you want, I just think it's the wrong battle you're picking.

I personally care very little about Trending as I aim to curate my followings, but I'm probably not very representative.