One of my favorite authors on Steemit, @remlaps-lite (@remlaps), often raises very relevant issues for this platform. In one of his recent posts [Experiment] Decentralized Steem Showcase, he once again raised the issue of the /promoted page. For those who don't know about this page, please read this post. Long story short: if you send any amount of SBD to @null and include the post address in the memo, that post will go to the /promoted page. The more SBD you send, the higher your post will be.
Unfortunately @remlaps is currently the only author using this feature. I went to this page and only saw 7 posts. Although this possibility is very interesting, it is not popular. However, this can and should be changed.
I'm still new to this platform and don't know much. But from what experienced authors told me, I learned that earlier the possibility of promoting your posts was popular because it guaranteed an upvote from a whale. In this way, the whale encouraged the burning of SBD. In my opinion, such a scheme had one catastrophic flaw, it was no different from vote buying.
What do I suggest?
The page /promoted can be a place for a guaranteed meeting of the curator and a post. This requires curators who are concerned about the future of this platform to regularly visit the page and support at least 1-2 posts.
What will we get? The first is competition between authors. Authors will compete with each other for a high place on the /promoted page. To do this, they will be forced to send more and more SBD to @null. This will further reduce inflation and will be very beneficial for the blockchain.
At the same time, this will not guarantee them an upvote, which is the main rule of Steemit. Curators, live people, will review the posts on the page and support the ones they really like.
So what does the author buy by sending SBD to @null? He buys guaranteed curators' attention to his post. But for this post to get support, it has to be worth it.
Of course, I can't force any of the curators to visit /promoted. But I can do it myself. And although I'm a very small curator, I commit to visiting this page regularly and looking at the posts that will be there. If I like one, I will definitely support it.
I invite other curators to join this initiative and announce it, preferably in a separate post in different communities, so that as many authors as possible learn about the possibility of guaranteed review of their post by the curator.
I personally invite the Steemit team to join the initiative. It can be a different form of participation. You can declare that the page /promoted will be regularly visited by SC01, or for this you can even create a separate account and a team that will manage it (for example, SC10). The main thing is for the Steemit team to announce it. Then the number of posts on the /promoted page will explode, just like what happened with the "burnsteem25" initiative.
Perhaps this proposal has even greater potential. It could potentially turn the inflationary model of the STEEM token economy into a deflationary one. In the long run, everyone benefits from this. If you are interested in this topic and in general the future of Steemit, please read the post The Steem blockchain was deflationary over the last 4 weeks.
Thanks to all curators, large and small, who decide to support this initiative.