Ideally people who wish to promote their posts would either invest in STEEM to power up and vote for their own content or buy Steem Dollars to use the promote feature and get seen.
The problem?
The promote tab has never been very useful.
For starters, very rarely does the amount of SBD invested in paying for promotion makes up for the gains of the publication. To make matters worse the actual exposure on the Promoted tab is minimal compared to the rest of the tabs in Steemit.
The solution?
I believe to start addressing this issue we need to make the Promoted tab great again, great for the first time, and making it into the default tab instead of the New tab may help. It doesn't hurt to try...
But it shouldn't stop there, Steem Power should be delegated to one or several accounts to vote for the content that gets promoted and increase the visibility and ROI on these posts.
Why bother?
The practice of buying votes has become very harmful, it encourages monopolies and little regard for quality from content creators.
When people buy STEEM to power up and promote their content by way of self vote they are actually committing to holding some STEEM for at least 3 months.
When people buy SBD to use the promote feature their deposit is taken out of circulation when sent to the @null account which can increase the value of everyone's tokens since they would become more rare.
But when people buy votes from bots rich people become richer and Steemit loses credibility as a place where content discovery is rewarded encouraging creativity and good curation, the consumption of content and ultimately the traffic flow that would make the tokens attractive to investors.