If you are unfamiliar with the terms, I assure you that you are not not unfamiliar with the behavior. There are those fellow sapiens who love to stand on podiums and talk about how They alone care, they alone worked hard for.. etc etc etc as if their words would have some sort of enlightening effect on the misguided listeners.

To those who are engaging in this behavior...

You lost before you started

   I'ts really that simple and if you think I'm incorrect ask yourself how many times you've dedicated any significant brain power to parsing through the words of another person hurling these type of sentences at you.

   In my head they have an almost magical effect of numbing my capacity for empathy. I have the hardest of times listening and caring what someone has to say if their goal is to convince me "How good and fair they are!"

Actions, not words

   If you actually do care, stop acting like the podium was designed for you. If your words are just words forming empty threats, infantile memes and pseudo altruistic rants, to me you are just a poorly polished demagogue of the keyboard warrior era.

   Silly me, I guess I'm talking about the same subject yet again because the trending page is simply unavoidable these days. It is something that needs to be corrected, but how should we approach it?

   In the search of answers, we have to ask ourselves what is the purpose of correcting it? Is it for user retention? Is it to get a front page in Forbes magazine that does not have some cliche Inspirational piece on it or a giant dildo? If every single person who is upset about what is trending has not truly asked themselves - Why am I really upset? then the solution will never become clear and the rants about the now painfully obvious problem will remain rants.

Is the biggest problem user retention?

   I happen to agree, it is one of the problems and a huge one at that. Maybe the trending page does confuse them, they think that they need to write cliche inspirational pieces to make money, and if you have been on this platform for more than a month you know how people can buy themselves all the trophies they want.

   But in the same line of thinking... How is my flag going to eradicate this behavior? Granted there is nothing to grandiose about my vested power, but even if it were considerably bigger like its the case with @grumpycat or even @transisto... Have their actions have done anything to eliminate the bots thus making the trending page "more real"? for whatever that means.

We should be fighting abuse!

   I'm not implying we should leave it be, it would be self defeating for me to think that I would like for the abusers and scammers to have the virtual freedoms good acting Steem users have. But the definition of the word abuse is not clear to many people who claim to be working for the health of Steem, for its economic success.

   We can't be myopic enough to believe that by making an environment that is hostile to investment, the result will be that art in all its shapes and packaging will flourish. Even if I wanted to be dramatic about it for the sake of making a strong point, I have a hard time saying that the up-voting bots are a necessary evil, because the there is nothing evil or good about a service people choose to use.

I got an idea, lets make drunk driving illegal.... boom problem solved

   If anyone here thinks there was no vote selling prior to the bots, you have been drinking some expired grape juice. The difference now is that it happens in the open, everyone has access to them and all the transactions get documented on the blockchain. If anything I would say today its better because at least we know how the game gets played. In the past some posts had ridiculous payouts and they were nothing but a copy pasta youtube links and yet everybody thought they were simply not getting it(the value of it), as if it was one of those I don't get modern art scenarios.

Maybe it feels good to drink some poison

   Maybe that it, maybe whats happening here is that when some users start insulting other users about buying upvotes and getting on to trending what they simply have found is a way to express their personal frustrations.

   This kind of reminds me of me as a teenager, when I would walk around some bad neighborhoods imagining how I would snap someone's neck if they attacked me. The whole thing would play in my head too, the thief would show up, say some things to me and all of the sudden Bruce Lee would somehow posses my body and I would end up with a piece of his arm as a personal trophy. I know now that I'm older that it was simply teenager angst and unbalanced chemicals reinforced by life experiences that changed my outlook of life... But I can remember pretty clearly that the poison is kind of sweet.

So what the hell is this Rant all about?

   You want to make sure artists don't leave? Support them. You want to make sure the Music Community stays strong? Show your face on those freaking comments, participate. You want to make sure people don't feel ignored, people feel appreciated? FREAKING TELL THEM YOU ARE HAPPY THEY ARE HERE.

Start a curation initiative, start a radio show, mentor someone... do something or simply shut up!

End of Today's rant...