When surfing on Steemit I usually focus on my feed and sometimes I check out the "new" category or take a look at specific tags. Today, I chose to click on promoted and was a bit surprised about the result.

Almost nobody seems to be using it anymore. It's not only the first entry on the list that is three days old, all of the top ~50 are between 2 and 6 days old and their pay-offs are not that high with an average of about 5$.

My hunch is that this might be because of the spread between the Steem price and the one for Steem Dollar. Currently, the latter is stable at 3 times the value of the first and that makes it a dominant strategy to substitute as much Steem for Steem Dollar in the payout ratio.

But beyond that, I found the promoted section always a bit as unnecessary and strange because it implied that somebody paid for his post to be seen in that list. This comes with a smell of advertisement/spam in the post, although of course that is not relevant here on the platform.

On top of this, I am not sure if too many users click either of the four categories. With the own feed and the specific tags, they are only interesting when you are new on Steemit.

And at at least for me it took quite a while to find out how this works with getting on the promoted list, because I ignored the rewards ratio for the most time (and of course didn't read the manual..). So, jSo, just in case you still don't know it: When you chose Power Up 100% for your rewards of the post, then you get - or got, looks like it's gone now - a nice button next to the article and it gets added to the promoted list.

Bottom line: I'm not a fortunate teller, but I would say the promoted list will be retired with the next bigger overhaul of the platform.

You know what I am now going to do? I will pick "power up" for this post, so it gets added to the promoted list!

Upvote this post if you are right-handed. Everyone else please don't downvote;-)