I blame Steemit INC for the take over of the paid bid bots and everyone delegating power to them. Now we have so many people trying to play king of the hill with the bots and also when new people come to Steemit the whole things looks like a confusing bot orgy.

It wouldn't be that hard to fix. Like you said moving those posts over to Promoted and then the trending page needs to use an algo that doesn't just throw the post with the most stake weight up there.

They need to look at a combination of stuff like stake weight, number of upvotes from accounts with at least 200 SP or something, views, resteems, rep, amount of comments .......etc . People will still try to game that but it is at least a little closer to Trending than it is now.

Trending has been a joke since day 1. For over two years it has been a huge problem with this place.