I have posted on this topic many times. One option is to remove the 'promoted' tab and integrate the built in promotion system that steemit has into the blockchain itself, so that promoted posts appear inline with the other posts - but are known by all to be promoted. UIs can then inform users of that situation. It would be up to the design of the promotion system to elegantly ensure that it is a superior option to using bid bots. I did previously suggest using some of Steemit's ninja mined steem to create a vote selling service that undercuts the bid bots and that sends profits to the reward pool - or something like that. I haven't done any hard maths on it but I think something like that could work.
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Agreed, just put a red box around the post with a cartouche that says promoted. Inject them every few organic posts. Seems like you could scrape the post or an automated bot comment to determine if it's promoted. This also wouldn't require downvoting to blast the post off trending if it's abusive or rejected by the community, because you could just flip a switch on the front end, so it would conserve the DV pool. This would at least mean these posts would have some passive curation attached to them, and not simply be the pull-an-upvote and blast it later model of curation we are all so used to seeing.
It's not really possible to guarantee that all bid bot services are caught since they could just operate quietly without advertising to avoid being flagged as a bot.. Although they would definitely be less successful that way. As long as there are top witnesses who are getting rich from bots, you are unlikely to see much shift in a truly positive direction in this regard.
The bots have to advertise in order for the masses to use them. I don't think it would be difficult to heuristically identify them. Sure they might leak a few through after they go live.
You pretty much have to agree to build the solution, implement it, and blast the non-conforming posts, declined payouts or not. Assuming they are having a preventive influence on this sort of progress, that is an argument for blasting declined posts as well.
i can think of fairly elaborate ways that vote selling platforms could anonymise their activity and advertise in discord servers, for example - similar to the way that large pump and dump schemes work.
It would not be possible to track their activity in a totally automated way. This is part of why they are allowed to operate so freely currently.
What people don't seem to understand is that the longer the bots are allowed to run, the more steem gets centralised into the hands of a few bot operators. Those operators can then put more and more of their team into the top 20 witness positions, which then guarantees that the platform will not make any decisions that go against them financially. Currently, the perception that 'bots are good' has many people voting for these witnesses without understanding that it is hurting them.