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RE: A Proposal to Make Promoted Posts Worth the Price Without Spamming Up SteemIt.com
I agree. Paying to get your post under the "paid" tab is worthless. Even if the cost is more to promote, they need to be shown randomly throughout all categories. The same way a paid commercial interrupts a tv show.
For proof of this, you need look no further than the history of the paid ad market on the 'net. Most people don't know this, but before Google's "amazing innovative creation" of AdWords, a man named Bill Gross created a site called GoTo.com. GoTo.com was a "pure pay to play" search engine. Bill tried to sell this technology to Larry and Sergei and (from what I recall reading) they were basically rude and said Google would never do something like that. A while later they came up with AdWords - which was basically plastering GoTo.com style ads on Google.com. The truth is the Google guys had a point. People don't want to "just" see promoted stuff. They want to see "organic" stuff - and people understand a little promoted stuff mixed in might be necessary.
p.s. The good news for Bill Gross is that he did sell GoTo.com to Yahoo (by that time it was called "Overture") and it became "Yahoo Search Marketing". I think they sued Google for some money too. A couple million ain't bad but it can't compare to the Billions Google is making.
p.p.s. This is all from memory so hopefully it's accurate. The main point is that finding the right mix of organic and paid is not easy but it's important. I actually like duckduckgo.com's model of one paid ad per SERP as I think Google.com SERPs are too crowded with ads.
Bill Gross Wikipedia Page
A lot of the info from this book can be applied to the SteemIt ecosystem.
https://www.amazon.com/Search-Google-Rewrote-Business-andTransformed/dp/1591841410