Without a doubt, a very complex issue.

My immediate thought is that posts are ultimately tied to an open-market currency (Steem) which changes price all the time... so there's also a functional limit to protecting people from downside exposure.

I do agree that upvotes as a measure is somewhat problematic... especially given all the bots. Sometimes spikes in rewards don't make real world sense because a bot upvoted something... but the bot didn't actually READ the content and say to itself "Wow, this is GREAT content!"

In principle, I like the little boxes with "how much to reward;" but how about instead simply asking "How did you LIKE this article?" with boxes being from a low of "1" to a high of "10," where the score becomes the relative weight of your upvote... it's more obvious than the current "slider" when we vote. And somehow-- built into the overall metric-- a bot vote carries a separate "seen it" weight (because that's all bots really do) vs. a "read it and manually liked it" vote.

Just thinking out loud here.