The Trending Page is 100% Well-Established Users

If you go to the trending page, you can currently scroll quite a way down without ever seeing a user who doesn't already have a large following and a history of successful posts.

This is more an observation than a complaint. It may be a problem and it may not. It is to be expected that to some degree, established users will usually do better than new users. People who are doing well, get more attention and followers and do better, it's a feedback loop or a virtuous cycle. On Youtube this is typical, the trending page is generally full of established Youtubers. Even on Reddit you have people like /u/gallowboob who seem to always be on the front page.

On the other hand it may be symptomatic of a problem. Some statistical posts by Hive account@eroche in recent months showed that prior to the whale experiment in mid March, new users were finding it virtually impossible to gain traction. This was likely the cause of the continuous downtrend, new users would find and join Steemit, but after making an attempt to participate, they were inevitably met with failure. And so users were leaving more quickly than they were joining, we had high churn. After the experiment, suddenly new users were finding some success and were more easily able to transition into established users, in other words we had 'social mobility' in Steem for the first time in many months.

If the trending page is always established users, that may be a symptom of the same problem. Stakeholders will need to be mindful of this possibility, lest we return to the perpetual downtrend and have a fate similar to digg.com.

Edit: A counterpoint to my post is that if you observe the New tab at the moment, once you're past a few minutes, virtually none of the posts have $0.00 rewards. That is very different to early March and before, where the vast majority of posts went entirely unrewarded. Yet it is still something to keep an eye on.