Ok, I get it. So based on those whom I already follow and posts that I usually look at, like food and gaming, those types of promoted posts will show up in my feed. That works.

Exactly!

Well, we can't say that everybody uses the Upvote Services, unless we're including the free ones. I can say that for myself, Upvote bots don't interest me, and I kind of started taking pride in the fact that my account is growing organically, with humans behind my upvotes.

I don't include free ones, as a matter of fact, even services like @qurator are pretty much fine by me. It is really the bigger players like @booster, @buildawhale, which, like I've said, I don't think poorly of them at all, both @frystikken and @markymark are doing great services for the community, it just so happens that their services are negatively affecting the ecosystem is all.

Now that I understand better, I think this promoted thing will help a bit, but I'm not sure it will remove the Upvote Service habit that people have. There needs to be something, perhaps included with this new promoted system, to not only entice people to want to use the Promoted service rather than the upvote bot, but to also make them NOT want to use those bots. Something that will truly make people be like "Ok, no more bots."

Maybe after an initial transition period, where people start to use more the promoted service, bots will slowly die down, but maybe they won't and not much will have changes. So something needs to be figured out to help steer people in the direction that is away from these bots.

I believe when users are provided a system far superior to the existing one, it is only natrual that they start to move away from the inferior one. The additional fact of where the money is going will tip the scale even faster.