Steemit's Trending Tab Is Misleading The Community!
What Is Trending?
Trending is a topic that has appeared or been searched many times on social media posts in a short period of time. This is what we're all used to. Trending typically means lots of your friends are actually interested and actively talking about a certain topic.
What Is Steemit Trending?
Steemit has 5 tabs to choose from when surfing the site.
- Trending
- New
- Hot
- Promoted
- Feed
Trending should be where all the organic / viral posts should appear based on organic voting of the community. New is self explanatory. They're the latest posts with regards to time. I'm still not sure what Hot is all about. I've maybe clicked it about twice. Promoted are posts that the author paid SBD to promote their post which would be equivalent to a Facebook ad. Your feed is where all the posts of all the profiles you follow show up.
The problem here is that we have a promoted tab that covers that advertising category. The problem is, trending also contains lots of ads! This is misleading for the community. For new members looking at trending and see a post with +$300 in rewards, they assume this person is a great contributor to the community and must be worth a follow, when in actuality they just paid $300 to voting bots to get to the top of the trending tab. This is advertising!
Conclusion
I'm not against advertising, but it will be important to distinguish ads from organic posting moving forward to create a trustworthy flow of content! Paid votes should not count towards hitting the trending tab. If you want to buy votes and advertise, then you should be on the promoted tab!
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?
Do you trust everything you see on the trending tab and influencer content? If so, you shouldn't!
Yeah they may as well get rid of the promoted tab, because hot is like a little bit paid promoted, trending is for the heavy spenders. lol
You mean get rid of the trending tab and move it all under the promoted tab, right! 😂 😂We don’t have a true trending function yet! Maybe someday... Thanks for the comment!
I don't think people would like that :p but yes that would be more realistic. lol
hmmm right @brettcalloway
hmm you make some good points i wonder what we can do to fix that issue maybe eventually better quality content will win out no matter what only time will tell.
I’m all for advertising and quality content we just need to distinguish between what the community considers quality and what is paid for views. Treading is a bit of both and it’s not immediately obvious which is which.
"viral posts should appear based on organic voting of the community" I agree and was hoping that good quality content would be a big factor within this platform. I seems like it's manipulated. Sick of Instagram and the follow/ unfollow. I will hang on for a bit on Steemit to see where it goes. Not too impressed with what I'm seeing so far.
I hear you! When you see all the vote buying, it becomes difficult to tell what the community actually wants and what messages people are paying to put in front of us. Kinda annoying! But still better than Facebook and Instagram! Hang here for a bit and things will improve. We have to remember we’re still in beta! 😂😂
It's still miles better than FB and Insta so i'll give this platform props for that.Besides this platform is actually helping people by rewarding them for content and i know lately that may not feel like that's the case but i honestly feel quality content win's out over time.
Yeah they may as well get rid of the promoted tab, because hot is like a little bit paid promoted, trending is for the heavy spenders. lol
Copying someones comments is considered spam. While I don't usually flag comments that are not either high frequency or part of some other type of abuse, I have been making an exception.