Nice work, awesome investigation. Zaps can be faked as long as there's an untrustworthy zap provider. I don't know if that can be fixed. Trending should rely on WoT analysis instead. I hope to work on decentralized curation down the road using NIP 32, which can add more signal to the social graph.
If you wanna see some algorithmic fuckery go look at the trending posts right now on nostr:npub12vkcxr0luzwp8e673v29eqjhrr7p9vqq8asav85swaepclllj09sylpugg . I’ve been noticing a trend with the trending posts and did an experiment to see if I’m right, and I believe I am. I posted this meme below, and then zapped it myself repeatedly using anon zaps. All of the top trending posts are either full of dozens and dozens of little anon zaps, or zaps by this Bitcoin Faucet Zapper bot. Completely useless feed, and 100% manipulated. What can be done to make this a more meaningful feed? nostr:npub16c0nh3dnadzqpm76uctf5hqhe2lny344zsmpm6feee9p5rdxaa9q586nvr 
nostr:note1gq6gf92eh04mgvxlx2slxp9hfheadx5nrrjzjp7pkunx5r2umgwqadpds2
Discussion
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I like the idea of WoT with trending. I think Primal even has, or at least had, a feed for “trending in my network” which was something like that. It might still be nice at times to see what is trending outside my WoT, but the criteria for creating that feed would ideally still be something users can define and tweak. At the very least it should be transparent, so people can see when someone is obviously manipulating it like in this case.
This is something Semi and I have been discussing as of late. 👀