Maybe some sort of algorithm that says if you vote XX or more and your posts were XX % successful, you get a bit extra?

Without the early incentive, you'll just vote for all the most successful posts late.

We are walled in right now to a list of hashtags and need something more intuitive... IMO.

We agree, but no one knows how to fix that. Not Facebook, not Reddit, not Twitter, etc.. It is an industry wide unsolved problem.