I can think of a simple solution that gives the power to the users to decide which post should be trending without much of effort:
we can simply add a dismiss button to each post showing on trending, hot and promoted pages and the users can dismiss the posts they are done reading or not interested from their feed, opening the space for other posts to get some attention.
Of curse we can just leave it at that and consider the problem fixed or we can use the generated data from the users preference to feed the algorithm that decides which post should be shown in those pages for a refined result.
How to refine the results:
The idea is removing the posts from the top and give the spotlight to other posts, we need to match 3 sets of data for each user for a better rating algorithm:
viewed status
upvoted / downvoted status
dismissed status
having that set of data we can calculate how interesting was the post to that user before dismissing it:
when a post is viewed, up-voted and dismissed: the position of the post goes down equal to a fixed amount for example $0.01 (or a portion of users sp)
a $200 post needs to be dismissed by 10000 users to be positioned as a $100 post in trending list
when a post is dismissed without being viewed: it loses twice the points as dismissed
when a post is viewed and dismissed without an upvote: it loses twice the points as dismissed
when a post is down-voted and dismissed: it loses four times as dismissed
of curse those numbers are from the top of my head, and we need to find the fair amounts after considering the number of active users and how fast do we want the posts go down the list.
pros
users decide what they want to see
the sum of users decisions effect the position of the post on the list
the amount of rewards for the posts remain untouched
since the top posts get dismissed more often, it will create an equality line that most of the trending posts will hover on, a $0.5 upvote can move a post from 100th position to the top 10, It sounds as fair as I can imagine.
even if a horde of fake accounts start dismissing one post all it loses is it's position in the trending list.
a heavily dismissed post have the chance to jump to the top if it's popular.
it promote the promotion of posts, simply by giving the post with a smaller promoted amounts a chance to appear in the top after the top posts get dismissed for a while
those who can afford it will burn more SBD to promote their post to stay on top longer, this will raise the value of SBD
Cons
possibility of dismiss attack (that will have a weak impact on posts we can ignore them)
I invite anybody with skill to take this idea and write the code and make a pull request, you can take all of the credit, I just want to see the dismiss button sometime soon.
