As for advertising, I would feel a hell of a lot better if the native promotion worked better and made bid bots obsolete.

This is the best possible outcome for the platform.

Currently, SBD is sent to @null for "promotion." In exchange for this sacrifice, you are rewarded with a higher ranking on a separate tab which nobody in their right mind would visit.

In my opinion this was the most terrible idea ever to exist, and I'd like to have a conversation with whoever came up with it. Not to shout or demean or attack in any way... to listen. I want to understand the reasoning behind that decision, because in my view, it alone is to blame for the current situation.

(That's right! I don't blame bot owners for doing what they're doing. They're doing what the platform allows them to do. The bidbot problem is systemic. It's a problem with our consensus code, full stop.)

Let's replace the current in-built promotion mechanism with one that actually assigns higher trending ranking to promoted posts, in proportion (let's say 10x) to the amount of STEEM (not SBD) that was burned. That's the first step and it would help the platform in several ways:

• Clean up Trending, since users are no longer pumping out low-quality posts just to "promote" them for a profit.
• Encourage the sale of SBD into STEEM, which would help fix our dollar peg.
• Encourage the burning of STEEM, which increases the value of everyone's stake.
• Provide a promotion service the bots simply cannot compete with.
• End all legitimacy of the "promotion" argument in support of bidbot usage.