This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately and one issue I think Steemit has is the ineffectiveness of it's own built in promotional system. The act of clicking on a separate page that consists of ONLY promoted posts is poor design IMHO.

Imagine if youtube had a commercials channel that was only ads, and people were expected to go there and volunteer to be advertised to.

No...I don't think so.

I think what they should do is copy what other social networks have done and

• Get rid of the promoted tab and put promoted posts in with the other posts, but add an icon that lets you know that it's a promoted post. If possible it would be great if we could even keep the bid bots so you have options as to how you'd like to promote your post, but even if you use bid bots, your post still shows up as promoted.
• In addition to that, there needs to be a button next to individual posts that lets you hide that post from your feed forever, so basically if you're promoting a post you've got your shot, but if your content is shit, everyone is just going to get rid of it.

This way we can still address the problem that every new user is going to have, which is getting initial traction. So if they want to pay, they can promote their post, and if it's good content, they'd have their shot at the masses, but we'd be easily able to get rid of the spam, and the Trending page hogs that pay to stay there for days at a time in all the top spots.

This way, that method of abusing bots, should become unprofitable. Especially if we combine that with coordinated downvoting for obvious abusers, but honestly I don't even think that would be necessary once it became obvious that that tactic doesn't work anymore.