The problem with rewarding comments is that this will increase the comment spam problem not decrease it.
I would suggest that when there are bots that spam comments and votes...there should be the more bots that punish comment spam and auto votes. The steem blockchain has the tools to regulate itself with flagging content if you find enough stakeholders for the good cause this will improve the experience.
By the way, SteemIt Inc can't directly change those rules, this can only be done by the witnesses. And they are elected by all members together.
I agree if the metric is simply the comment #, what should be rewarded is the (organic) interaction a comment generates.
Does it generate subcomments? are those comments upvoted.
but I agree it is difficult to put in place rules that can´t be gamed by automation.
Flagging is a miserable failure as far as I can tell:
you can´t manually flag automated behaviour
flagging sets you up for retaliation flags, so no one bothers
Dissenting opinions are flagged by whale profiles, so no healthy debate is possible
as far as I can tell, flagging is not steering behaviours consistently
Overall I´d say the platform as is, is screwed in the medium term, unless some serious attention is paid to improving the overall user experience. But Steemit Inc. obviously is not interested in getting this out of Beta, they are gunning for the big bucks by inventing an ICO bypass with their media token.
I think that strategy is seriously flawed, sure it might make the token more valuable but if that attracts even more users (and bots) to the platform in it´s current state it might mean the whole thing will collapse more quickly. The whole concept is shoddy as a social network and it simply won´t survive a huge influx of new users because it will only make the overall user experience worse for everyone. So people come, try it, don´t get results, decide they don´t like it and abandon it... Really hoping for some magical rabbit out of the hat to be announced at Steemfest...
I can agree with the analysis about the problem but I think it can be solved. It might take time but I see so many ppl working and thinking about the solution. Also many of the whales because it’s in their long term interest to.
I hope so . There seems to be some movement now with the redesign. Need to explore it still. Really hope it is more than some new colours....
I hope it is fixable but it needs to become a priority... a social media token with a crappy social media experience simply won't take off...
One thing they did not bother to fix is the notification flags... arghhh how difficult can that be since 4 months I don 't get a flag if someone replies to me... kinda basic...
Did you take a look at other frontends? Notification is not a Blockchain function. Maybe you find e.g. Busy.org more like your style.