RE: Steemit Needs to Change its Reward System to Better Incentivize Intelligent Discourse in Blogs: The Comment Section Should Be the Lifeblood of Steemit, Pledge 50% of my rewards to top Commenters
Came over here because of your comment on my recent game theory article, thanks for pointing me to your post!
I completely agree with you, commenters are typically not compensated well for their efforts. But check out this post, which as of this writing has a $900 payout pending, but its top comment is currently worth over $1300.
I think that first and foremost, the low payouts received by comments are a major failure of reader engagement, rather than a failure of the algorithm. I'm intrigued by the possibility of committing a significant portion of a post's payout to commenters. It could be done like this: 25% of the article's payout goes to comments (regardless of number of votes), and is distributed quadratically to the highest-voted comments. With this system, you'd have a pretty dramatic front-runner bias, where the first comment to see upvotes would be the one that receives the most upvotes, since comments are displayed in order of pending payout. But it's an interesting idea and we should think about it more.
I originally upvoted my own comment to send it to the top of the list, but that's not very cool when you're offering to pay me for it. Upvote removed.
I upvoted it!!
Nice to see a comment receive more than the opening post. But it's rare, and as you said is a failure of reader engagement. People just like posts they think may go viral and provide low content replies.
As for the algorithm, it's tough to balance. The algorithm obviously has its positives, such as weeding out spam and rewarding those who sift through the endless content and like what is quality. But like you said, an additional payout algorithm that quadratically distributes payouts to commenters would help