Tools to build a subcommunities are still quite weak in Steemit. Users are mostly just following good writers, which means that they read new texts and upvote them and go on to find something new to read.

To empower actual communities here, there should be some kind of way to subscribe topics/tags. That would make a community of like-minded people who are reading the same stuff and hopefully also make them comment much more than they are doing currently.

Notifications are also very important. I can see if somebody has replied to my comment, but that should be more automatic, like in Twitter of Facebook. Now I have to go to see the special page that shows all replies to me. Better solution would be a clear notification that is shown in all pages when I'm logged in to Steemit.

I'd like to have notifications when somebody else has commented on a post that I've commented. Now the only way to see that is to go back and browse through all the posts that I've commented to see if anybody else has left any comment since I checked it last time. It's not a great system to create real discussion.