Every week with a predefined period, people can put in comments a special character combination, such as "+1". At the end, you can filter and sort the posts that have this comment and amount of it. Lets say you will focus on first 10. As a final step you can select/arrange to end up with a more selective post. This way I would expect community to engage more with the posts and ease the burden.
All the best...Hello @castleberry, about the curation load, maybe you can leave it to the community and then elect the finalists manually. Some sort of automation may help here. For example;
Not a bad idea at all. Thanks for offering some suggestions. Still thinking on a path forward while catching up. Keep up the great work.