One thing that bothers me as well is the pandering to whales (a lot like in the real world). If a whale posts something, anything, every plankton in the pond rushes to upvote because they know the post will get huge rewards regardless of its quality. It becomes self-fulfilling as most whales are friends, having been around for long while and to a certain extent upvote each other.
I'm less bothered by the fact that "trending" shows posts that have been upvoted by bots, it's a bit like advertising. If you believe your post is really good, what means do you have to show it to people ? You have "promoted" but there you waste your money. And then you have the bots and trending and you mostly recoup your money.
Now if you bring to trend a shitty post maybe there should be a parallel mechanism to gather opinion, that would be less directly linked to money.
For instance an additional "like" or something. You pay for advertising and I am grateful to @yallapapi and @suesa they did so because otherwise I woldn't have discovered their very nice posts. But people could also indicate that they didn't appreciate your post, without linking that to the rewards, at least in the beginning. Regardless of how much @suesa post made (I don't think $800 is fair but it's not outrageous either. It's not $15 000), we could have a parallel signalling: I enjoyed / didn't enjoy that post.
With this information, we could afterwards implement a more fine grained mechanism to discourage shitty posts somehow.
The key message is: the system needs to be made more sensitive, fine-grained, accomodate more varied inputs, not just monetary rewards. Communities is probably going in the right direction
It is precisely the advertising aspect that bothers me. If all the posts in Trending paid to be there, what makes Trending different from Promoted? I saw another comment that suggested all bidbot posts should be listed in Promoted rather than trending for that very reason. One could argue that self voted posts be moved there for similar reasons. Other than 'New', all the tabs are really just showing posts that paid to be there.
Indeed ... could be the right thing to do - move bid-bot upvoted posts to Promoted ...
There is also a difference between bidbots (as they currently work) and advertising. When you pay for an advertisement, you have no guaranteed return, no-one is obligated to buy your product. There is an element of risk. Bidbots should also have no guaranteed return. However, if we refuse to downvote them, then we are basically allowing them to force us, as a community, to purchase their content (via the reward pool).
It is precisely the lack of risk inherent in them that means they are scamming everyone else. This is why I do not see a problem in them being downvoted. Introducing that element of risk will make people more cautious in using them, especially for low quality content.