The point of a content curation system is to produce a ranked list of content. Yes, from the voter's perspective, it's just "I rank this as x dollars", but a good content curation system will aggregate all of those individual decisions into an ordered set that approximates the actual combined preferences of the users so that readers can quickly find things of interest.

In that context, it is possible to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a particular voting scheme before injecting it into the blockchain.

You should read A Puff of Steem: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation. There is much to learn, and it suggests several techniques by which the strengths and weakness of any proposal might be quantified before slapping it into the running block chain.