No doubt, I feel you. TBH a lot of the stuff in the trending, new, hot, and promoted areas I don't pay any mind to whatsoever. It's boring to me so I just focus on monitoring specific tags that are of high interest to me instead of those major sections.

Even if someone did buy in at like 10 million and posted "Hi Everyone!" and upvoted their own content at 100% 20 times a day causing them to dominate the trending; then that may be evidence that the algorithm should be focused more on the content of a post as opposed to the value it is set to receive in upvotes.

I think the various portals should probably consider that with respects to how they code their algorithms to display new posts to the blockchain. I see portal wars in the future. We already see it now and it looks like steempeak is starting to gain in popularity.

They're sorting by popular tags of interest. They don't have the trending, new, hot, and promoted areas listed like the first portal does. Who knows maybe the answer is to promote the blockchain via portals that don't put a high emphasis on those three categories. That way new people wouldn't be instantly turned off by what they see trending.