The new reward pool will cut the bot economy in two and drive bots to the other economy, duplicating the root causal issue on Steemit of a lack of human consciousness that is the only thing that can actually engage in attention and comment/reward actual comments.

I'm not sure I understand, although I want to. At first this sounds good: cutting the bot economy in half. But then are you suggesting that the other half of the bot economy will find a way to take advantage of rewarding comments?

People already have the real motivation to engage and feed off each other's attention, but they need the capabilities and functionality...

This , I think I can more easily understand and agree with. I think the idea of commenting and appreciating each other can be better woven into the Steemit invitation. Five or Six months ago, i signed up, posted an introduce-yourself post, and began looking around the site. I came across articles by steemit and others that encouraged comments, interacting, and upvoting each other... At that time, one was given 10 steem for signing up. And within a couple days, I had half of that because I was being penalized for upvoting and leaving a simple "Thank You" on people's posts. Did someone see this as "spammy"? I don't know. Did someone have a problem with leaving a simple "Thank You". I don't know. I only know that seeing that I lost steem for doing what the site supposedly encouraged, only encouraged me to not come back for a while. I returned to day jobs, improv, and interacting with friends already on facebook and twitter where a simple 'great job' or 'thank you' is not met with a financial retribution, because there's nothing financial about those platforms. I've since come back to Steemit because of the content. And I also appreciate comments, even though my posts don't get many, and even though leaving them for others cuts into the time i could spend creating my own posts. This comment alone might be long enough to be it's own post. But this conversation is worth taking the time to appreciate the value of @krnel's post. And I like that my comments are apart of my profile, much like my blog. I like that steemit is different than facebook and twitter. I think that it works and will continue to work. My humble suggestion to cut down on cutting each other down via 'downvotes'. Perhaps that can be left for downvoting the bots, and not the peeps. Either way, it is my hope, and I recognize that hope is not a strategy, but all the same it is my hope, that steemit will continue to build on the positives that it first presented: To give value to creativity, community, and conversation by and for the people.