When Google started to dominate the search engine scene in the late 90s, one contributing factor was their new PageRank algorithm. There are many explanations of how this works, including on here and here on Steemit and on wikipedia, so I won't go through it again here.
Anyway, for while I've been considering how a similar algorithm might be employed on our open social network to help us discover good content without utilising votes, which have been largely corrupted by the use of bidbots. Having spent the last few days reconfiguring some of the data that I collect with the Sincerity project, I have a very basic experimental alternative trending view here:
https://steem-sincerity.dapptools.info/s/api/trending-1
It looks at the resteems given to posts, the stake of the account resteeming and number of resteems they are doing. So for example somebody who resteems 100 posts a day is diluting their resteem 'votes' so they aren't worth much, and the resteems from an account with 100,000SP are given more weight (though not proportionally more) than one with 100SP.
EDIT: Having tried a simpler stake-weighted resteem view, I thought I'd include it here too:
https://steem-sincerity.dapptools.info/s/api/trending-2
(this actually seems to work better at the moment, but I hope to refine the work over the coming days)
I'm collecting resteems and also follows into the Sincerity database, so depending on support this might develop into something quite interesting, but it is a very basic interface and formula at the moment. I'd appreciate any feedback on the quality (or otherwise) of the results, as it's all fairly subjective.