I'm curious why those posts in your screenshot are orange, and not blue. Here's what it looks like in mine with light mode:

I'm wondering if your PC is having trouble pulling the promoted post list from SteemWorld... If you click on one of the dollar amounts, do you see the "Promotion Cost" highlighted in blue?

Edited to add:

I suggest putting the titles of the first five posts from the /promoted page here.

I'd suggest one step further. Select five titles at random, with the odds of selection proportionate to the promotion amount. This way, even low-ranked promotions could get some placements. It's fairly easy to implement at current usage rates, although it could eventually present scaling challenges, so a long term solution might depend on hivemind as well as condenser. One compromise might be to select randomly from the first N posts, where N is something like 10 or 100 or 1000. Another compromise might be to implement some sort of price floor (F) and choose randomly from posts where the promotion value is above F.