Definitely need a better promotion system. Sending to null and using a bidbot (as they currently exist) will never work because there’s no way to tell how much yield (if any) is gonna come off those bidbot bids.
The problem with what the ocdb guys are doing is that, for some reason, the only content that gets upvoted is meta content. That is, content on steem about steem, these days, is the path of least resistance to higher value upvotes. So that’s most of the content that we see.
And that’s great for engaging with the people currently on steem, but it’s shit for bringing new turtles to the island. The key to increasing the value of steem tokens is creating a trending page or pages that will attract new un-Steemed eyeballs to engage with the content AND be inspired enough to join the ecosystem as a staked consumer and/or staked content creator.
And that’s almost impossible to do with meta content.