You said it might help people feel as if things are more fair. I'm telling you: it doesn't matter what you change, those same people, after the change, will still think it's unfair.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You know how it is, I'm sure.

A view BONUS would cater to all sides. Hard workers would get what they earned and others would see that they earned it. Sometimes we don't earn votes, but nobody would be able to say we didn't earn the bonus, so that actually makes it fair. Bonuses have proven to work in the past in the workforce. Everyone looks forward to them and they work as a team to acquire them. Those receiving high rewards for something like a self vote and low views would miss out on the money they like so much and might want to step up their game. I would also factor in the self vote and have a percentage of the bonus deducted because of the self vote. That could in turn allow those earning low rewards and high views to earn far more than someone who'd prefer to game the system. The view bonus turns into an incentive to perform well and the overall quality of content will increase. I would remove the chance of earning a bonus from any "promoted" post that used bots so people cannot cheat.

Promoted posts could then sit in the promoted section, but banners could be placed on blogs. Now we have real ads and people are not being misled to vote for advertisements and real content where it belongs, hopefully collecting views. Clicking the banner inside the post leads to the promotion. That click could double as a vote for the post and that's how people generate ad revenue from promotions here. The view bonus for promotions then gets dispersed evenly to those who helped drive traffic to the promotion. That's the second way having an ad helps generate revenue to the blogger.

Now we have a complete system where votes work as likes and pay bloggers, views earn a bonus, clicking an ad gives the blogger a vote(because people click links and forget to vote quite often) along with a bonus of ad revenue. Those paying to advertise is where the money comes from for that bonus.

That's one way to balance things and make it "fair". Multiple ways to earn all in one and if you still can't earn, those folks must be doing something wrong and will just have to deal with it.