A lot of new users keep thanking me for reading their post and supporting them. I feel like I have to set the record straight about that since a while now.
Many discussions revolve around the situation with whales and dolphins dominating the reward pool. As a steem user of the first hour and a whale myself I am of course aware of this, and since the beginning I have been thinking about ways how that could be fixed. I had my part in sometimes hefty discussions in the early days, and was proposing a change in the reward curve long before the last hard fork. But changes in the blockchain rules can only do that much. Equally, or even more important, is the behavior of the users.
I hate the trending page. I can rage on for hours how there's always the same people up there, posting just for the sake of getting another couple of hundreds of dollars of rewards. Attempting to spread the reward pool further I spent months curating manually, but with the growing number of posts that became impossible to do thoroughly. For a while I stopped voting completely, because I felt that my weight was too high and I just couldn't vote "fairly".
A couple of months ago I then came up with a solution. My own trail bot, following a diverse list of mostly manual curators. Over time I added features like a blacklist, avoiding self votes, avoiding votes on dual accounts, and some stats. It's running stable since weeks, and with a lot of nodes used by other bots and services going down yesterday this seems to be a good moment to release the code to the public. Here you go: https://github.com/pharesim/steem-trailbot
It uses the public node at ws://steemd.pevo.science:8090 but you can of course change that.
I hope it can help others to spread the love too. Steem has so much more to offer than the current trending posts - help to show that to the world!