I like this idea a lot!

For investors, it's actually better than delegating to bid bots because the bid bot income is still variable (ie, if no one uses that bid bot, less is paid out to delegators) and for everyone else it's better because actual popular content could make it to Trending.

Lots of people do spend money on bidbots in order to get their work noticed... say if they're launching a new Dapp and want to get the word out... but we do have the Promoted tab that hardly anyone uses... but I think it would become far more used if that's where all the cool new Dapp info, etc was.

I think Trending would be $60 posts of people that get a couple of whale autovotes and Dtube... but still, that's far more in reach for a newbie than the crazy $1000 posts.

I still think Haejin will still get up there... only because I don't believe that deal is about getting eyes on his work, but more about squeezing as much from the rewardpool as possible... I imagine Rancho gets weekly/monthly fiat kickbacks or similar. Parys and his ilk would die off though, which is reason enough to give it a shot.

It would mean that whales would make that tough decision to either silently invest or actively invest... the active does more good but the silent earns more... which 'should' mean that more quality work is upvoted by active whales.

It's definitely a novel idea... I'd be more than happy to offer the option for silent investors to maximise... after all, they did invest sums of money to make something back on it.