One of the proposed upcoming changes to the platform is creating a separate reward pool for comments. The goal is to incentivize users to have more and better discussions. While monetary incentives are one way of looking at this, it might not be the most efficient at this point.
I just left a comment on Github about this:
Lack of comments is UI problem because notification system is still weak. If I find an interesting post and leave a comment, I don't get any notifications for discussion that happens afterwards if nobody comments my comment. There might be dozens of great comments but I will be unaware of them because I don't usually check same post several times. I just read the post once, maybe leave a comment and move on to other stuff.
On the other hand, lack group functionality in the blockchain is also preventing high quality discussions. Currently Steemit is just a publishing platform. If we want to be also a social network, we need to let users to form communities.
If we want Steemit to be a platform for meaningful discussion, we must find an answer to this question: How people are going to find like-minded users? Searching for old posts is not a great way because you can't even reply to an old post. Best thing you can do is to find interesting authors and follow them and hope they will post something in the future that will ignite good discussion.
Tags can help, but they lack very important feature: users can't follow a tag. I've been thinking about this lately and came to a conclusion that "join community" is necessary if we want to have communities in Steemit. Following a tag would be one necessary step to that direction.
Another necessary feature for communities is exclusion of unwanted users. Otherwise good communities will be poisoned by spammers and trolls when they become successful.
I've written about this few times:
Feature proposal: Ownable tags (tldr: if somebody owns a tag, they can decide who can post using that tag which is exclusion feature; in addition to that owned tags should be followable which is the "join community" feature)
Feature I'd like to see in the roadmap: Steemroom (group functionality in the blockchain) (steemroom is great name for group functionality)
This relates very much to a problem that I haven't seen getting much attention: too much noise. Among many other things, it causes good discussions to disappear so fast that many times they don't even get started.
Better notification system would tell the user about discussion that he probably will enjoy, thus making the user experience nicer. I want the system to tell me where the discussion is happening instead of me having to go and actively search for it – there is so much noise that it's pretty hard.
Group functionality would reduce the noise because users could focus on groups of like-minded people instead of this chaotic bunch of individual posters. In the current system it's pretty much about good luck than anything else if somebody wishes to find meaningful discussions.
So yeah, I am also critical of having a separate reward pool for comments. Better notifications and group functionality would be much more efficient ways to create discussion.