I think something should be done to incentivize commentary / discussion. Steemit says it's subjective proof of work, but the fact is, there's no way of telling if a person consumed the post intelligibly. A post upvote doesn't mean that.

A good solution will be this - an option to set X % of post payout for commentary / discussion distribution. As the owner of the post, your votes on your post's comments will be amplified by the reserved post payout. This way, it's not so much your SP that matters. In your domain (your post), you have a say on how to allocate good chunks of the payout to great comments. (Now I'm trying a more ghetto approach by reserving part of my post payout for great comments, manually sent. Just saying this could be an in-built feature that weighs itself through your votes on comments in your own posts)

Personally, I think if we fill part of the front-page of Steemit with interesting posts, with well-rewarded civil comments / collabs / discussions / debate / problem-solving, this will get plenty of potential users into the platform.

What whales need to look out for: Interesting posts + Account owners that are known to be mindful, responsive, and really cares about their materials. There's a motivation to learn different stuff, and try contributing. There may be a case for such a culture - everyone's a creator and valuable consumer at the same time. Let's build stuff together, and be rewarded for participation.