If you've ever been on the trending page, you've probably seen some of the exact same kinds of posts from the exact same kinds of users, multiple times each day. It has been risky to speak out against this scenario and even doing so had little or no effect.
I must stress that these kinds of trending posts are not the root problem, in and of themselves. The problem is caused by certain voting patterns.
Simply put, it's a way for one user to temporarily "oppose" another user. The user who wants to do the negation has to tie up their STEEM Power. If they have enough STEEM Power, they can completely negate the other user. Or, if they prefer, they can only negate a certain percentage of the other user's vote.
Since it takes STEEM Power to perform vote negation, this will have the side-effect of creating additional utility for STEEM Power, which could translate to more demand. If a user decides they want to negate another user, but they still want curation rewards, they'll have to get more STEEM Power.
Likewise, users that finds themselves negated might want to overcome the negation with more STEEM Power, or take a break, which frees up rewards from the curation pool. Both of these scenarios are beneficial to the community.
Alice loves chickens. She's also a huge whale. So anytime someone posts about chickens, she upvotes them. In and of itself, this is not a problem, but because she is now the main patron of all chicken posts, many users start to post about chickens. On any given day, there are 3 chicken posts on the trending page.
Bob doesn't care about chickens. He is also a huge whale. Bob decides to oppose chicken posts. His rationale is that the trending page shouldn't have any chicken posts at all, because before Alice started upvoting them, chickens never made it to the trending page.
So Bob decides to negate Alice for a week. He dedicates 25% of his STEEM Power to negate Alice. Since Alice and Bob have approximately equal stake, Bob is just negating a portion of Alice's votes.
Both Alice and Bob now have to make do with only 75% of their STEEM Power, which translates to roughly 75% fewer curation rewards. It's in Alice's best interest to ease up on her chicken fascination a bit.
Over the course of that week, there are indeed fewer trending chicken posts. They're not completely gone, but since the payout is starting to drop, the users look elsewhere for topics to write about. The feedback loop has been broken and things start to settle down.
Is the problem solved for good? Only time will tell. For now, since Bob's negation of Alice expires after one week, he decides to go ahead and let it lapse since he has now seen the trend die out.
