I agree, I think that is still the best way, but now there is no chance for it to "trend" once you have done that work. Does scaling mean that we leave all that work to the bots? If there isn't a chance to trend organically or real human interaction, I don't see the point.

We need tools that make it easy and rewarding to curate. Say you have 1M SP and can make 50 impactful votes per day... how would you most effectively distribute them? To find 50 good but undervalued posts on steemit.com every day might take quite a while. And the modest bump to each one would not provide much exposure (e.g., on trending), which means it's unlikely for others to find it and place more votes on top (and increase your curation return). This discourages cooperation at the social layer and creates a negative feedback loop.

To me, scaling means giving users the tools to solve this dilemma.