I don't notice them lately, surely because I am not the best content creator around

You don't have to be one to have ex-bid bots upvotes. I've seen quite lame posts getting upvoted by such. I guess they simply upvote posts randomly nowadays or have a few favorite users not bothering to discover others.

The trending page hasn't changed a lot. No more paid votes, but as you said, just a few types of posts from the same users that appear over and over again. I don't even care about that sbd potato and burning steem initiatives.

Let them burn theirs, I earned mine hard. I really have no clue how the price of Steem will ever recover. It has $317,428 in daily volume. That's very low.

Steem really needs to change something in order to attract investors. People with lots of money check projects before investing massively. It's sad that a blockchain with so much potential has such a undervalued cryptocurrency.