Sorry I'm so awful at keeping things succinct:
it's still a shitpost that doesn't deserve to be on Trending, it doesn't even deserve a dollar since it brings no value to the community.
This is obviously your opinion - it's a subjective statement and that's my point. Your idea of value appears to be website projects that start with D.
It depends what we want from Steemit. Do we want a trending page to just be a list of steem dates and steem promotion and steem analysis and steem complaints, or do we want something 'trendy'?
If we're to have a trending page of 'trendy' posts, currently the only way to do that for the vast majority of cases is to either be a team of very skilled coders with huge delegations, or be someone with enough money for bot promotion. Right now there's just no other way.
$800 is surely excessive, but on the flip side I upvoted a single post of mine to $150 once, partly for international women's day, partly because I got flagged by some haejin goon, but that $150 post was totally invisible, I had to scroll several loading pages to get to it past all the haejin crypto jargon, posts like today's 'Double Bubble Analysis: update' and'Monthly Steemit Top 200 POWER UP List: March 2018' The post awareness of the hell women go through around the world went by comparatively silently.
Of course, mainstream adoption nis going to want to see things like inane april fools posts, travel blogs, philosophical discussions, political views, pranks, games. Natural social media material. So whether or not you personally find the post funny or clever, the fact that a high-rep individual contributing a lot to the community had some fun and somebody else got it into trending, to me, is totally fine and really one of the few good examples of bot usage.
Again, 800 could have been halved with the same effect, but much less? Back you go to obscurity, replaced by crypto steem bull patterns, 'Steem experiment: Burn post's and so on. (Actually today isn't a bad day for variety, but you get the idea)
I said that only the projects with D, the big projects that help grow this ecosystem, the ones that have countless hours of work behind them are those that deserve 800. But I didn't say that they are the only ones of value, the only ones that deserve big rewards.
The way I see it, it's straightforward, does a particular post helps the community? Does it brings any value to people? Does it help the people? Does it change something for the better? I think you see where I'm going and if the answer to some of the questions is affirmative then that post is valuable.
Now I'm asking you, what value does that post from @Suesa brings to the community that it deserve to have such a huge payout? None. Let's even say that the post reached its whole purpose of being funny but that still doesn't mean that it deserves so much since we have plenty of other posts a lot more valuable.
I feel what you mean mate, but if people didn't abuse the bots anymore there would be a lot more room for the quality, valuable posts to make it to the top. I had in the past some of my posts upvoted organically to 100-200 even 200+, and they did not reach the top because there were too many posts upvoted by bots.
The discussion is not even about that post from @Suesa but a reflection of what's going on on Trending. So yeah, the page is filled with shitposts that are outshining the quality and organic ones just because they paid for votes. The solution? Either stopping the bots (not going to happen) or flagging the posts, so the users don't abuse bots anymore (doable).
Sure, although don't see why the 'trending' page should be filled with 'helpful' stuff. It should be filled with 'trending' stuff. You don't see twitter trending tweets about twitters dev team or how they've helped speed up tweet times, you see people's every day lives and loves and adventures. That is inherently what I see as 'valuable'.
But you're right, it's not entirely about suesa, we both agree that the bot situation is a big-ass problem, and as I said, I don't even disagree with this idea, I'm all for it. I just think there should be methods to prevent arbitrary and blanket flags, something more objective than simply 'this post is shit and presumably just for profit based on my opinion'. Perhaps you are right that things over 800 bucks should be only for big projects - perhaps bots can set tiers for such things; registered projects having the highest/unlimited bid limits, everybody else capped at, say, $400.
The problem with flagging is at best it makes a temporary statement. Even all the activism on steemit made haejin's posts go from, at the peak value time, $450 down to about $400 a pop. Flagging is almost nothing more than a symbolic statement at this point until people learn to band together via powerful communities (flag-a-whale being a hopeful example of that)
Yes, I see what you mean, I think the Trending page should be filled with what the community thinks it's valuable. If they consider a post being of quality, they upvote it, if more are doing so, it reaches Trending. But the whole purpose of this platform is lost when people are using bots to get to Trending, 85% of the votes being bought.
As far as I noticed, the big projects don't use bots; they are reaching trending thanks to the support received from the community since they are doing something beneficial for everybody. But yeah, the bots need to set some more limits.
Flag-a-whale was a beautiful movement, and even if it had many people behind it, it's sad that the outcome was not the one desired.
I guess we have to wait and see what happens now. :)