There are a lot of complexities to consider when trying to fix one of the biggest economic shortfalls we have as a blockchain. Instead of getting into all of the theoretical implications, I'll keep it simple. We need a solid burn mechanism for the blockchain. I've already basically written off any fixes to curation until Communities and SMTs get implemented, which I feel are in some ways necessary to create a content driven dApp on STEEM, but that doesn't mean we have no options right now.
Ultimately I want Steemit Inc to implement this change on the official steemit.com website, but we really don't have to wait for them to do this. Busy, Partiko, or Steempeak could easily implement the change that I'm about to suggest and I hope that one of their devs at least considers what I'm about to suggest. Without further ado, here is what I think is one of the easiest and most obvious solutions to plugging a giant hole in the STEEM ecosystem: We should make post promotion competitive.
I suggest we do this as suggested in this pull request. Essentially, the goal is to get rid of the "promoted" tab that it would seem the majority of people don't use. We then place promoted posts interspersed throughout the hot and trending tabs, possibly even into our personalized feeds if we want to really drive competition. A simple suggestion of how to do this would be one in every five posts in these sections is a "promoted" post that requires a user to burn STEEM or SBD and compete for placement higher up the list. This gets rid of the monopoly that bidbots have on post promotion and creates a viable burn mechanism for our blockchain.
If there is no interest in doing this from an official Steemit Inc development level, then the alternative is to do this for other front ends. Partiko, Busy, and Steempeak as well as others could incentive burning STEEM/SBD for post promotion and possibly reward users with SMTs in the future or work with the devs for STEEM Keychain to implement tokens through them. There are ways that this could be used to benefit the different front ends by taking a percentage of the STEEM/SBD that would have been burned and powering up their community accounts.
I think this change gets rid of the need to consider implementing and selling ads from outside of the STEEM ecosystem to drive value into the platform by letting users create that same value by promoting themselves. Clearly people want to promote their content, why not create a way to allow them to do so while also adding value to the platform? Thanks for your time and consideration. Namaste.