Extreme case No. 1 lesson from politics
How about a Single transferable vote
a voting system designed to achieve proportional prefference through ranked voting. A curator has a single vote initially a fraction allocated to their most preferred content of the day and, as the count proceeds and candidates are either put on the trending page the remaining vote fractions are transferred to other contents according to the voter's stated preferences, in proportion to any surplus or discarded collective votes.
This would encourage actual content digestion by "humans" and gives equal opportunity annonymously to man and machine. A content should be left to be judged by Humans and not bots at least for 24hrs Imho.
It sounds pretty complicated. I don't think that I understand how such a mechanism would be implemented. Also, a large change to the fundamental way the voting works is not really going to be likely at this stage of the game. Even small tweaks (like the threshold of voting weight depletion) will be met with strong opposition from people in the community that like the way things are. Change is hard :)