I think the vote selling on Steem is causing active harm as it creates an arms race to pay more and more to promote posts onto trending. That causes some people to give up as they don't have money to buy Steem for votes. I choose to not play that game. You can earn here by building connections with people rather than bots. I see accounts that only buy votes and never comment on other posts. Their lack of replies indicates that few are reading their content.

I find good posts via the people I follow.

I will look into Steeve, and not just because we have similar names. There are other attempts to expose good content, but new users may not see those. Seeing the trending page first creates wrong expectations.

We can't stop people buying votes, but we can engage with them and point out the alternatives.