So I stumbled upon a post earlier about auto votes and how it influences trending content. Only a group of content creators get the stoplight which is not good for the community in the long run.
The trending page is the face of the community. You can tell a lot about a community and its value system from its trending page. This is why it is important to get the best posts up there.
Now, I do agree that auto votes aren't ideal and we should work towards having a transparent system of evaluating content but here are some of my observations:
The community is smaller than most people think. There are a handful of quality contents that are informative, engaging and posted regularly. Also, a small portion of this said small group are dedicated members of the pob-community.
Pob whales play a huge role in determining what makes it to the trending page and they are few. They also have their limitations in terms of how much content they can curate daily. This is why auto vote is a thing--to regularly reward content creators with a good reputation. This is common practice across various social platforms. Reputation matters.
For the first problem, we need more quality authors. However, there is still a huge challenge in determining quality since it is a very subjective matter.
For the second problem, we need better distribution which will only take time and people should consider building a good social reputation which is valuable. Unfortunately, the whales determine what gets to the trending page and manual curation does not solve this problem either.
Upvotes cannot be a true reflection of the value of a content. This is because the values of each upvote is not the same which gives a few more influence over the others. So this debate about the trending page will never end because people will always have issues regarding how other people use their stake. In fact, I wrote something similar in a different community about a year ago (this explains why I am bored of most of the conversations here. We continue to deliberate over similar issues in different ways)
However, we have seen that over the past year a lot of people have stopped caring about the trending page--on hive. Most people have gravitated to communities where they are appreciated and well represented. This might be a temporary solution for the trending page issue.
If we are truly honest about solving the visibility problem then we need a different metric for evaluating the popularity of a piece of content, order than upvotes. Other meaningful indicators like views, comments--engagement should be used in determining what ends up on the trending page.
This might hurt the whales and their influence on the chain but I think that's the best line of action. If 10-20 people determine what ends up on the trending page I certainly will not lose sleep over it. Rather, I will channel my energy elsewhere.
To be fair on the whales, it is not their sole responsibility to curate content. Those who earn sizable pob tokens should also build their stake to better the distribution of the token and help new and talented content creators gain visibility.
What am I doing to help distribution and visibility?
I certainly do not have the stake to give anyone visibility on the chain and I dread that power to a certain degree. However, I do curate and engage with as many content creators as possible while building my stake.
What are you doing?
It is quite easy to point fingers at other people without actively helping to solve the problem. So what are doing to help distribution and visibility on the pob platform?