The trend pages do not resemble blogging quality, only the strong ones are there, those who are part of the lobby groups.

Please refrain from painting everyone with a broad brush. Thanks for basically calling my work garbage, and no I'm not part of some frikkin' "lobby group." Instead of making it about me though, I could also point out plenty of others who've earned high trending page slots honestly today and in recent memory. How do you think they'll feel if they stumble across your message here today? Achieving that status honestly and organically was nearly impossible for two years and now you're attempting to take everything some people worked towards and flush it all down the toilet because you're having a bad day.

It's fine if you're one of these disgruntled members of the community and no you don't have to agree with everything and everyone but there's no need to throw everyone under the bus and attempt to make everyone look bad just to make a point. Speak on the facts and drop the sensationalism, please.

I see you're also actively downvoting people. One account received several downvotes from you today in a very short period of time. There's no possible way you could have consumed that content in that amount of time and made a fair decision when curating up or down, so it's obviously something else. If you're sitting here having a "war" with people, that is your business, your life — and your life and experience is not a direct reflection of the lives and experiences of everyone else here. You speak for yourself, not everyone else, so keep that in mind.

Instead of a downvote, I would introduce a ban from the list.

There were 44000 accounts already placed on a blacklist for paid vote abuse. You can't even show me 44000 accounts who's blog, as a business, benefited from using paid votes, but I can show you an entire list that size of people who abused it.

Those 44000 accounts blacklisted for abuse and ALL of the other members here purchasing votes hurt my blog, as a business. Burying my work and the work of everyone else who wanted to blog and earn honestly. The very action of someone purchasing an upvote would indirectly place a downvote on my work, since their behavior pushed my work down the rankings. Did ANY of these people care about all those they were indirectly downvoting when they purchase an upvote? NOPE! And they lied as well! Said it was about "promotion" and "visibility" yet suddenly, when there's no PROFIT involved, like magic, they no longer want to "promote" for "visibility" (the visibility they were taking away from EVERYONE ELSE). Go figure. They've shown their true colors these days, after two years of lies.

I'm under the impression the changes around here are about balance and fairness and needed to happen because things were not balanced and fair.

Watching people pout about taking away a dysfunctional system that worked in their favor, after they had spent two years gleefully taking opportunities away from everyone else around them, is like working at a daycare and being surrounded by toddlers.