I understand you can track who gets paid by smartsteem and minnowbooster, but we can't correlate an upvote done legitimately and an upvote that was done by the bidding company when a user Steem Power went up past a certain %-percentage,  the bidding companies they transfer the funds payment internally, and they user move the SBD lump sum into the their account later, could be weeks, or months later.

i've thought about this:
- monitoring clusters of upvotes with no correlations but are regular payouts on smartsteem or minnowbooster (and mark that bids cluster if say it exceeds >$1.0 so it's removed from trending total)
- just mass exclude all upvotes from all people who subscribe to smartsteem or minnowbooster or receive payment in the last x-number-of-day (eg. 7 days if they got bidding payment all the upvotes don't count for trending)

find a solution, let me know, I look forward to seeing your feedback.

i have visited both of them before, but I didn't know you were driving and supporting them, will go  upvote  https://steemit.com/@steemflagrewards and https://steemit.com/@flagawhale both sounds like very healthy initiatives. i like the names and the spirit of the initiatives!

you got my witness vote:

![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmXSEaHtsWmXuwzkjKa8p8Yg7Zvm5vfVgyY5gviMUXRD8f/image.png)