I can add to this my experience from doing Word of Mouth Wednesdays (WoMWs) for a while now. While WoMWs have been bounties, they are essentially contests with prizes as I'm not offering bounties to everyone who completes a task so much as the stacker who completes the task best.

Initially, I steered away from human judging. The first few WoMWs were decided by zaprank or some other "objective" ranking (eg. most retweets on X). But I kept creating contests that were too easily gamed and it didn't always produce the results I was hoping for.

When it comes to contests, I think human judging is probably always going to be the best. Sure, it is subjective and people play favorites and it's never fair, but taste is like that.

When it comes to algorithms and what content shows up on home screens, I'm much more interested in zaprank. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work to have somebody sitting there reading every SN post and deciding where to rank it on the home page. It might work well for a day, but I don't think it would ever be sensitive enough to changing trends and topics to keep up with what the community wants to see. Zaprank is. And zaprank is better than any purely trust-based algorithm because it includes at least one component that is difficult to fake: sats.