Another idea, which can be implemented at the blink of an eye technically, is to reward discussions like this one - which currently only you and me and a handful of leechers might see - by putting them automatically on the trending pages.

This here is a high-quality discussion, on this page. To add value by other people to this page, people need to notice this discussion so they KNOW they can participate actively themselves. The quality of this discussion, right here, does not come forward from my amount of followers (I've been here for 10 days, 55 followers, and the followers follow my article posts, rarely my comment posts!) or even your followers (1609 followers right now, but how many are online and following this discussion actively? Right now there are 19 views, and we account for more than half of those).

In order to make that happen, articles could be trending based on the amount of comments. The problem with that of course is that that metric could be tricked by bots posting auto-horse shit to a discussion.

But I have "invented" a solution metric for just that! I thought of a metric called "user authority" as a basis to distinguish what's quality and what's not.
And that actually pretty simple to implement based on a user's followers (not who they follow but who follows them!).

I define it as follows:

User Authority = [ cumulative followers estimated account value ( $ ) + user estimated account value ] / steem market capitalization ( $ )

Using this metric, a page can be automatically put on the "trending pages" by the following rule:

Number of comments on page X User authority (per comment)

PS: this is completely different from simply looking at a user's own account value. It comes forward form "you are who you know, not what you own".

... I'm going to write an article on this I just decided! :-)