Can't wait to see the effect of separate downvote pool on our current trending list, perhaps people will think twice should they really be promoting their content to top spots. Finally the community can start efficiently curating, pushing good content up and bad content down, as we should've been able from the very start.
Thank you for making these posts by the way!
I wonder have you explored how many posts in trending 1-20 spots are promoted over a long period of time? And how much manual, active curation is happening compared to passive?
Good reasoning and good question.
I can answer simply, all top 20 post are promoted. The important question is what's their cost in % and net $ after reward returns.
The answer is; it takes currently a budget of 115$ worth of STEEM to promote a fresh post near the top with cost of about -5%. yes, negative cost, that's a 5% profit. Meaning anything less than a 5$ downvote has no negative effect whatsoever in people promoting bad content to the top.
There are two solution to this.
A lot of more external money would be interested in buying votes at high premium if the top #trendings were bigger center of attention.
At @Steemium we've been collecting historical data of every bidbot bidding rounds and snapshots of top 50 trending for the last 7 months. Here are some charts that might interest you https://steemium.com/#/statistics/trending