I guess what we forget is that relative to other media, even the much-derided 'old media' of TV, steemit is a tiny player - kind of the equivalent of a community radio station or local public-access TV channel. What 'works' for a network with 60,000 active logins per day might not be the same for a TV show with 6,000,000 viewers or a network with 1400,000,000 daily active users.
And while we are on the topic of 'promotion', can we please stop pretending that any of this would be considered effective advertising out in the wider world. The Nickelodeon's 2018 Kids' Choice Awards has, according to Neilsen, generated 7,953,000 interactions - now that's promotion!
On a more personal, and somewhat conciliatory note, it's also true that who sees your stuff is at least as important as how many views you get. I've done two media interviews (one with a News Corp owned publication), and there's the possibility of a third, largely on the basis of publishing opinion-pieces on a site that has about 10% of steemit's traffic.
This place will shine brighter once they start detecting these bots and placing the ads on the promoted page, where they belong.
Right now, as of this writing, we have four posts on the trending page that all talk about scams. Three of these posts were published by bot owners.
So the promoters are basically promoting how scamming the place seems, because of their services.
I read comments and I see sycophants praising this nonsense.
Cable access channels with their tiny audiences of a town of 30000 still put their infomercials in the weaker time slots.
I'm baffled.