Yeah, does kinda sound like it would benefit bots over people.

I've had a thought just now, hear me out cause it could have holes but if someone can expand upon it it could be a start. Instead of up/down vote (or any kind of approval or disapproval) perhaps just an exclamation mark (so could be bad or good, either way it doesn't matter it got their attention).

Then, any post a user exclaimed is put in that user's list of exclaimed things. unsure if this should be visible to just that user or not, but to start let's say it's private. Even if it's private, when a post is exclaimed and the user has been active say in the last 12 hours this bumps up the post's popularity. If a user that exclaimed a post stops being active after those 12 hours it drops the popularity of the post (ie for that users exclamation to continue to bump up yeh post popularity they just need to launch into a lemmy app again). The same can be achieved if the user goes to their list and remove the exclamation or if they simply delete their account (or it is deleted or blocked for example if the user was a bot either by an admin, automated bot detection or the bot creator themselves).

Perhaps based on a posts age (say it was months ago) some kind of permenant number of exclamation marks (locked in number) could come into play, but when things are fresh and relevant it might help.