Of late, I have seen a ton of grievances about the Trending page and perceived unfairness in how rewards are distributed. The whale-no-voting experiment and SP delegation were intended to make things more fair, but instead it seems to have had the opposite effect on more rewards being concentrated on the top 1% authors.
Allow me to state the bleeding obvious. This is, of course, the expected effect of a completely free market. Particularly in the case of free market curation of creative content, things have always been like this. It's a popularity contest, and the winner is not necessarily - almost never - the highest quality.
A word about quality first. Quality is subjective, of course, but a general objectivity could arguably be formed when enthusiasts (not authorities) in the field form a consensus. More importantly, quality has absolutely nothing to do with the perceived effort. Genius can strike in moments. A brilliant meme that took 5 minutes to make is absolutely worth as much in the field of memes as a movie trilogy that took a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to make is worth in the field of cinema.
The American free market is arguably more regulated than Steem. If popularity were to truly equal quality, Justin Bieber and Fifty Shades of Grey would be the finest works of their respective medium.
What bothers me, though, is the widespread trolling and hate speech surrounding Justin Bieber. Similarly, a lot of people (mostly privately) seem to be upset by the top authors. That's grossly unfair - the authors are doing nothing wrong.
Instead, blame the curators, if you must. A free, open market was always going to devolve into the popular authors getting all the votes, with everyone else fighting for scraps. But at the same time, it's up to the market makers to make it a better market.
I believe that we can make a better free market, and that's what I wish to engage the community in discussion. As I see it, we have four options -
Curate at will. Vote on whatever you find. At a macro scale, this will inevitably be mostly Trending posts and popular authors.
Vote for your friends and people you follow.
Find good curators and delegate SP to them / follow them.
Those are of course what most people do, and will always do.
However, given that we are early adopters, here's an idea - we need to curate "responsibly". Currently, that means curating content that brings value to the platform. Which means curating content which will appeal to the mainstream audience. This means we should control our votes on posts about crypto, Steem, our friends etc. Vote on content from newcomers in popular topics. (And earn more curation rewards while you vote on undiscovered posts) Turn off those auto-bots on popular authors - they don't get you significant curation rewards anyway. Vote on established bloggers/vloggers who are new to Steem and have a significant follower base. Vote for engaging posts about movies, music, sports, gaming. Vote for engaging memes, linkshares, personal rants. Continue voting for active developers as they bring a lot of value to the platform.
Look at the Reddit page today. That's the kind of content we need on the Trending page - stuff that your buddies, your grandma care about, and not just what Steem geeks need.
I hope you get the gist of it. It's just an idea, something to think about. Let me know what you think!
At the end of the day, curators decide. The no-whale-voting experiment (which I affectionately call abitgate) has proven that this community can rally together in a united manner. It's up to us to decide how the platform's rewards are shaped and how attractive it is to the mainstream. Let's not underestimate how important first impressions (i.e. Trending page) are.