Steemit is not ad-free at all

I remember one of the selling points introduced by Steemit when I get to know Steem, is that Steemit is free of advertisement. But that's not true since the beginning. Advertisement is always here on Steemit, as it is on all the places when attention has a price. And I'm not even talking about the last implementation of advertisement on the platform, which could be blocked entirely simply by an ad-blocker.

Here you go, the Trending and Hot page is both the largest advertisement page that no ad-blocker could block. What defines something as advertisement? According to the definition of “advertisement” from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary,

A paid notice that tells people about a product or service.

Very short and precise. Close to none of the posts from Trending and Hot page are without the aid of voting-bots, they are paid to vote a post and transform that to essentially an advertisement on Steemit.

I'm not saying advertisement is bad, but people need to stop thinking that Steemit is ad-free. It is not.