I don't like the fact that a whale may not vote on an article that they may like simply because it is not as lucrative as another. Great content is great content and should be treated as such whether it only has a penny or ten thousand dollars.
It is a flawed system if the goal is to create an algorithm to pick out content in my opinion. Bots will not be able to judge content as well as people and while they can make some good decisions, they will make far more upvotes of less wothy posts than their human counterparts.
I don't think this is true. Humans make tons of crap choices. But really bots won't pick better, they will just predict human predictions. A great bot would help humans find choices they normally WOULDN'T find.
Maybe a bot could give a feed of suggestions and the decision to vote could be left up to a real human. You are right though. Humans do make many crap choices whether or not they intend to. A blending of an algorithm that takes into account your values - discussion, creative comments etc. and places it into a feed next to the one for those you follow could be an interesting idea.
That's a really interesting idea. A kind of 'Recommended' stream, rather like recommened music or recommended posts on a blog? The good thing about bots is they can scan LOTS of stuff really quickly, and if they're any good, they should be able to pick out a good range of stuff for a human curator to choose from. Interesting.