Thanks for your post. Finally somebody is providing a different perspective.
SteemIt is promoted to the ‘outside’ world as a platform where you can earn (good) money by blogging. So everybody who signs up, has high hopes. Only to find out that all their hard work disappears into the dark dungeons of SteemIt where all past-payout posts go, without making a single buck, heck, without anyone ever noticing their post.
A high percentage of new users leaves again within a month. Who can blame them, after all there were a lot of promises, and no (financial) rewards.

Most Steemians have no or little history in blogging, (decent) social media, let alone marketing. They don’t know that building an engaging audience takes time. The ads for SteemIt tell them otherwise...

I agree with your point about marking paid-for posts as promoted posts. As for now, the ‘Trending’ page is the face of SteemIt, and it’s loaded with a lot of crap. Just the other day, I read an article in which someone said he didn’t even want to show the platform to his friends, because they would land on the Trending page and would think he was crazy for spending his time here. I can fully understand.

After I signed up for SteemIt, it didn’t take me long to realize that Steemit ‘success’ isn’t about the quality of your content, it’s about how much money you have and who you know.

I think of myself as being one of the fortunate ones who has discovered that the real value of SteemIt has nothing to do with the financial rewards; the community is the real strength of SteemIt. The connections - the friends - I made here in this short while on SteemIt are worth way more than money could ever buy...

I must admit I do use the upvote bots - not always, but I do. It might sound a little crazy, but if I see the stats on steem.supply show at least a little value, it gives me a boost - although I’m very aware that I paid for that ‘money’ myself (the mind works in strange ways - lol)
I would never spend hundeds of Dollars, though. Although... if I would have the money, I would probably ‘buy’ the trending page to see some quality posts on there. Simply because a lot of authors deserve to be there, and SteemIt deserves to look better on the outside.

IMHO, if nothing changes, there is little hope for the platform. Blockchain technology is evolving at the speed of light, and it won’t take much longer before a modern version of SteemIt will be started, and SteemIt will become history. (And that modern version will exist until greed takes over again, and the system wil become just as ‘corrupt’ as SteemIt is now. People are just not responsible enough to take care of their own)