Do you know who Ned Scott is? Well, if you are older than two on this blockchain then there are high chances you know him or have at least heard of this name. I almost forgot about him, but I saw a tweet from @acidyo today having a screenshot which was showing that he's blocked on Twitter by Ned.
The same goes for @dalz too... I guess they put the truth in front of his eyes after "he sold us" back in 2020 that got them the block from Ned on Twitter, but you know what instantly pops into my mind whenever I think of Ned Scott? My early days on Steemit and how flawed the trending page was back then.
As mentioned in many of my blog posts from that era I see such a page as a business card for the platform. Someone new to Hive has a high chance of getting in touch with the community for the first time through the posts featured on the trending page. Hence...
I said multiple times the Steemit trending page was flawed and I stand by that statement because I remember my days as a newbie. I also remember that I was checking what posts were featured on that page every day and as you probably know already, back in those days, there were literally the same individuals having posts featured over there over and over again.
With occasional "surprise entries" from accounts that had enough dough to pay the required bid bots so that their content would be pushed on the trending page. A lot of the new accounts that we have now on Hive probably don't know that most of the renowned curators that are currently "upvoting their posts for free" are actually ex-bid bots.
If you don't know what a bid bot was, well it's pretty simple. Someone who felt like needing some exposure for his account, or his content, and couldn't get it organically could send some liquid STEEM or SBD to such an account(bid bot) and these would upvote that person's post with almost the exact vote value of what the user sent in liquid tokens to the bid bot account.
Now we're getting fatty upvotes from accounts like @appreciator, @haejin, @ranchorelaxo, @ocd, and many other fatty whales basically for free and oftentimes based on no type of circle jerking habits... I had literally zero posts on the trending page in the Steemit era, but since Hive got born and curation turned more organically I can say I've had my fair share of such posts.
I'm not the usual face you will see on that page, but been there, and done that...
The current trending page that we have is quite proper for a business card the way I see it, cuz every time my eyes peek at the posts featured over there I can clearly see diversity. I will have to "blame that" on organic curation coming from ex-bid bots' accounts. I've noticed however that every community somehow has its curators, except for @appreciator and @haejin who seem to upvote posts randomly.
Communities have been a game changer for Hive since they went out live because the content that is put on the blockchain for a couple of years already is somehow sorted... Back then it was all so random...
Anyway, I don't want to deviate from the topic of this post which is the trending page, thus if I will have to draw a conclusion to it, I'd say that the current trending on Hive is as "close to reality" as it can and almost everyone has his/her fair share to get there.
What do you think?
Thanks for your attention,
Adrian