You've got some things so wrong here Dan. I'm not afraid to say it despite the risk of being labelled 'old steem'.

By the way, just labelling an idea as 'old steem' doesn't make it bad. This is something I've seen more and more in the last month. Let's make one thing clear before I get into my thoughts on the whole trending and bought votes issue; new steem Vs old steem is just a marketing technique. It's not a fckn religion and I'm not a heretic, ok.

First off, bidbots are bad for steem. If we have a system where the only content reaching trending is that which people have paid for we're exactly the same as everyone else. Do we want to be Facebook? Where people get a feed full of promoted posts about crap they don't want to buy? I thought steem was trying to do/be something different? I know that's how it would become a huge success, by being different to all those jaded social media sites that take advantage of their users. Maybe I'm being a little over critical of the idea as people at least have the choice whether they look at trending, but newbies go there and look at it to gauge what steem is all about.

Honestly, who is anyone to think they deserve a free spot on trending? Regardless of your content is hot shit or not, trending space should never be free, ever.

So, why do you deserve a free spot on trending with this post, if it reaches trending? Is that by virtue of the fact that you've got over a million SP and the support that this massive financial commitment garners you? By the way, I'm not pointing this out to attack you or your writing, I know you don't self vote and you write well... I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy in the idea that no one deserves a free spot. This is BS, plenty of content creators on here right now are getting big support by virtue of the fact they write about steem, and parrot the consensus opinion, or are cheerleaders for steem. From what I can see reading through all of this post, you are pretty much saying trending should only be for advertising and steem related content? Which they should pay for using bidbots or burning their steem, or both. I could get behind that if there were a page/section on all the steem front ends that showcases the varied tallents of steemians based on qualitive metrics; such as the authors post page reads and if curation guilds have voted on them. Then maybe whales/orcas/dolphins could trawl through this mythical place and reward those content creators of quality and create an honest steem USP. Here's why that is important.

I'm gonna lay it out with 100% honesty to you Dan, because I do respect the fact that you're one of the biggest fish here who actually seems to act with some integrity. Also, I want any newbies who may be reading this to understand how much the current narrative from many is pushing against the dream that they're here pursuing. From one steemian (me) who literally has a few thousand dollars in crypto which is all my wealth, to another steemian (you) who I'd guess is a millionaire business person, this is the draw for the average person arrived on steem; they see that some people are earning a decent dollar value from blogging/vlogging etc and they want to learn how to earn. It's that simple. That is the USP of steem, or at least it was always what kept me wanting to come back and I'd argue at 90% of steemians are the same. And you know what, that's not the problem. That's the only thing we have going for us over medium, patreon, Facebook etc; the combined monitary/social draw.

My point is that we will never have an honest organic trending section while bidbots and vote selling proliferates. People always come back at me when I make these points saying 'vote selling used to go on behind closed doors in private chat groups'. Well duh, of course it did, the difference is that they weren't businesses extracting large chunks of value to one person (bidbot owners who in the main don't produce any content of merit). It's super simple, if vote selling was shut down at source, we'd all be able to spend our free downvotes dealing with those voting rings and self voters who don't interact with the community at all. One less problem to deal with. I know I spotted a circle jerk within 3 months of being on steem and figured out it was all about those people having the same 10000 SP level. That was at a time where I believed in steem's (then) moto... 'be rewarded for your content'. But I remember being pretty disappointed to see that 'circle jerks' were seemingly the only way to find consistent success.

I think bid bots that offer ROI are bad.

To be honest, I think we kinda agree here, although I'd rather see all bid bots gone, if only because it would make policing steem abuse easier. I could get behind a steem where the only promotion methods were none profit, either burning all profits, or on a constant growth cycle where all profits were powered up to grow the promotion bots account to give bigger ROI for bought votes, also with strict quality control. But even this is a stretch to not ending up being abused.

I'll end this comment with this thought; If seeing your content on trending is to be like buying a spot on mount Olympus, then who will go look at trending? To most content creators steem offers a dream, to actually have people find value in what they are creating, whether monitary or in attention. If we keep watering down this draw, if we keep shiting (pardon my language but I'm passionate about these issues) in their bed of flowers, then the stinc will drive them all away as they'll no longer buy into the dream. With no audience (market) there won't be anyone for developers, blockchain games or advertisers to sell their products to on trending. As I said earlier, if there was some type of page where only organically trending articles were showcased, and whales/orcas visited said page to help drive that steem dream and reward high quality content, then I could get behind the idea of a sold trending page. I simply wouldn't go near it myself. But that wouldn't be a big change, as the only time I've been on trending in the last 18 months is in the last week to use my free downvotes on overvalued crap content.

I hope this comment is taken in the spirit it is meant. As a counterpoint to what you're expressing. If it's taken as 'old steem' then so be it... as Monty python once said...