I think back to some of the early days on the "old" chain where there was engagement and one of the fairly solid ways for largely invisible newcomers was to simply cruise around and authentically engage and when you were patient, you could not only build your account because you frequently earned a small reward from an upvote, but people saw you engage on higher profile posts... and it all fed on itself.
Of course, this was happening within a nascent culture of upvoting worthy comments before that all went down the tubes of greed. And that seems to be the eternal challenge... the idealists seem unable to persevere in the face of the greedy over time. So these experiments like VYB are very hopeful, to me.
=^..^=