The thing is that the promoted tab never worked.
There was serious flaws with promotion, and the developers just ignored it.
Plus, at that time, i could scroll through the New tab and find interesting stuff and people to follow.

What steemit really needs is better searching and sorting.
They still haven't implemented the resteemed tab they were working on over a year ago.

A simple addition would be when you go to someone home page, to see a list of their top used tags. Then you could sort by tag to see what you came looking for.

Another easy thing would be a New tab with filters.
New posts with more than 100 words or some such would be really nice.

Right now, i could write all of that, but it would abuse the steem blockchain. Basically, it would (get the next 20) discard 19 of them, and repeat until you had a list.

And, i really don't know what i would do about promotion.
This site really needs it.
Before everyone sorts by vote count instead of dollar amount.