Thank you for reading the discussion and for the comprehensive reply. There's a lot to agree with here, and I appreciate reading your take on the topic.

The ideals that I take from your reply are:

• Create less reliance on Steemit
• Minimize participation in reward-maximization schemes that add little value to the blockchain (or even detract value).
• Maximize manual curation
• Find and support content producers who prioritize audience and/or engagement before rewards. (IMO, "skin in the game" like burning rewards or promoting posts is a very strong signal on this point.)

I more or less agree on all of those points, except that I'm a believer that automated curation can also be valuable, if it's done with an aim to promote attractive content production.

Of course, I could write numerous paragraphs on each of those points, but I'll suffice it to say that the current powerdown status of one of our favorite delegation bots makes me think that the 2^nd point is the most pressing at the moment. ;-)

Lastly, thank you very much for agreeing to visit /promoted, since that was the original point that @o1eh raised in this thread! I look forward to seeing how that evolves.