>On those whitelists / blacklists / standard-setting. It's mostly just to virtue signal and hope the standard isn't so low that it attracts downvotes.

Not quite I think. There has to be a range of content (at least on the blogging side) to attract consumers and only having shit upvoted highly isn't going to cut it. If this was only Snapchat, perhaps it would be okay to only have crap there. 

Later of course, these paid votes on content (other than advertising) should disappear altogether but, we aren't at that point yet so - gotta align other parts of the system first.