Unexploited Opportunity: Post Promotion

Among those reading this post, the absolute majority knows about the existence of the /promoted page. It is designed to display posts that are promoted. The concept of post promotion is that if you want your post to get more attention, or you come across an extremely interesting post and want it to be read by as many readers as possible, you can pay to promote it and it will go to the /promoted page. The money you spend on promoting a post is burned, not going to enrich someone. In my opinion, this concept is very brilliant, but implemented imperfectly.

The main difference of the Steem blockchain is the ability to receive rewards for your content. So almost always people promoted their own posts with the hope of getting more support or at least more interaction. Unfortunately, the /promoted page is as if somewhere in a parallel dimension, it exists, but no one sees it, no link of any interface leads to it. Readers simply do not know about it, and those who know, do not feel the need to enter the address of the page in the browser to get there.

Undoubtedly, such an implementation was doomed to failure. People promoted posts only when they knew that one of the big curators would vote for their post. In certain periods of time, it had some financial success, because tokens were burned, which slightly reduced inflation. But the main concept did not work - the post did not reach a large number of readers.

The decision to hide the /promoted page was rather... strange. When you pay for advertising, you hardly expect it to be hidden somewhere under the bed. On the contrary, it is demonstrated in as crowded places as possible.

In general, I would be interested if Steemit's post promotion system worked. I think it would be a good opportunity to meet new authors. Of course, there would be authors who would promote terrible posts in the hope of making money with minimal effort. But I think they would have abandoned these efforts without receiving attention from the community.

Now that Steemit is in the process of updating the interface, it's time to consider options to give the post promotion initiative a second lease of life.

Simple ways

The simpler the method, the greater the chances of its implementation. So, we need that as a result of promoting a post, it gets the attention of readers, provided that the post is interesting.

One option is to place a link to the page /promoted somewhere in a visible place. This will make the page much easier to access, but it won't guarantee that readers will have a reason to go there.

Another possible method is to set a redirect from the main steemit.com page to /promoted. But this is also not the best solution. First, a project that has a redirect from the main page looks frivolous. Second, how often do any of you visit the main Steemit page?

A complicated way

There is a solution that I believe would be effective and would benefit both readers and authors. But I'm afraid that implementing it is very difficult.

I think it would be ideal if the first three posts from the page /promoted were displayed to every Steemit user on the page /feed.

This would have many advantages:

• the majority of readers do not go beyond their own feed, so displaying promoted posts there will have the greatest reach;
• the post promotion system will no longer depend on large curators;
• authors will be able to get new readers, especially this will be useful for novice authors;
• readers can meet new authors if they wish;
• displaying only the first three posts in the feed will create healthy competition between those promoting the posts and allow more tokens to be burned overall.

Keep my feed clean! - I'm hearing from @chriddi. That is why I propose to limit it to only three posts, which could be displayed even in a separate block at the top of the page immediately after the inscription "My Friends".

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I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Is such an implementation possible? Is it appropriate? Do we even need the ability to promote posts?