I like our trending page, minus a few bad actors that the stakeholders will not flag, unless someone pays them to take care of their own investment. (LOL)
What we need to add is an "Interesting" or another tab that pulls from the most active and discussed posts and those that receive votes that aren't from the known bots.
All content site allow people to promote content and everyone knows it. It's not a problem. In fact professional level content creators know the model and are used to it.
The problem is simple. When you use the internet, on a daily basis, you go to:
The key question is - why ever entering Steemit? Unless you are one of the authors.
It would be 100 times more successful if it would be something specialized, but good.
It would be also useful from the marketing POV.
The message from Steemit, Advertisement sections is:
We have 140.000 users, from 156 countries, with completely different interest!!!
From any reasonable perspective, this is a nightmare.
What / How to sell anything to those people?
Funnelling will be terrible (to nothing). This is why they can't sell banners.
For regular users:
Very, very tricky situation...
These are actually interesting points.
However, go take a new look at trending. Most of trending is filled with people who bought steem or spent steem and locked it up for 13 weeks to promote something.
A new project, either internal or external. A few of our stakeholder are so out of touch with our own site and users that they are actually mad about that. :)