My concern initially would be all the sock puppet accounts upvoting comments of selected commentators. However, what might be a saving grace to all this would be:

If bloggers off steemit could implement a STEEM comment thread which displayed the monetary rewards on the comments, this could be a great way to drive people to steemit and put steemit in the view of more people online. This gives us a lot of potential to grow! The only issue would be if those rewards were miniscule, which they are with the current system.

I think this has the potential to become one of the more viral applications of STEEM. Consider if this could be integrated into a platform like YELP or G2Crowd.

Imagine a restaurateur or a software development company wanted to reward commentators for providing reviews and comments on their customer experiences. Or in lieu of gift cards and rebates, they could provide STEEM rewards. Suddenly something like this causes the perceived value and utility of STEEM to increase. That could be the saving grace and great equalizer.

I would imagine in order to pull something like this off, one would necessarily have to increase the rewards associated with comments. I would hope there is a bold move like this driving this latest upgrade.