Is it so vital to be on trending? You do know that most established users won't look there? It just seems to be a way to get lots of minnow attention as they fish for votes on their comments and it gives a false sense of what is popular. In any case you need to buy huge votes to even get on there. I see you are not always doing this.

I do flag posts that I think are abusing the bots. Not all of them operate blacklists. People will do this just to earn a few cents each time, but it's depriving those who actually put in work of their rewards as it reduced what is available. It's also making the vote sellers ever-more powerful. Is that the Steem we want to see?

There's an interesting paragraph in the white paper:

Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.

I'm not sure I see the value of abuse, but I will do what I can to make it non-profitable for those who give nothing back to Steem. I want to see good creators get rewarded, but the system is getting skewed in a bad way.

My preference would be to not have trending as the default page for new users. Hot is better, if still open to gaming.