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
I agree with you that the commenting rewards can be improved ...and also about the game theory of rewards and it probably will be at least tweaked down the road. If you do comment on popular threads early and get noticed there are often good rewards given out. There are other good reasons to comment. You can comment to engage with others in the community, especially the author. I will look at commenter's blog if they have something interesting to say in a comment on my blog posts. Your Quora & LessWrong links are great discussion threads. However I think there are various types of posts that illicit comments naturally and others that don't. Music, photos, essays, stories usually get minimal engagement. People just like reading posts.. I would end up commenting something like 'Great post!' but realize a bot like Wang can do that so I let the upvote & rewards indicate my enjoyment or support. Other controversial topics or questions do illicit comments naturally. If we were a link sharing site like Reddit, posts would illicit comments as well. However the platform is more like Medium & Tumblr. The community and posts feel real and authentic compared to other websites and I like that a lot. Rather than making changes to the blockchain we can probably just create alternative websites 'SteemQuora, or SteemReddit' .. specifically to focus on questions and link sharing. There will be a different culture on those platforms and I think you can achieve the desired effect.
BTW sidenote: You're flying under the radar especially with all the stories you have. I think you can create just one nicely formatted post with a lot of images about the drama of your poker tournament win experience.. or any other tourneys. You can explain the details, insights about what your thought process is, or just stories in the poker world.. You can also break out certain experiences into short blog posts ...there's probably a worthwhile story in every big pot game. Put a little drama in it. Make some money on posts and then worry about comments..lol! You'll have a bigger reputation and audience that will support any complaints you have.
Thanks for the advice, will make some posts like that in the future. But this was a more generic observation about the lack of intellectual discourse and low content introductory posts getting upvoted to 15k inspiring people to post every link and thing they can think of trying to make .02 at a time. I just picture exactly what you said, steemquora and steemreddit with deep thought and effort put into discussion because there is a tangible reward on top of pure intellectual pursuits
I hear you. Sounds good. ttyl!