[Steemit-upgrades] User sign ups and commenting incentives

Easier access to Steemit Sign-ups

I've had several users this week letting me know how hard it is to actually sign up to Steemit for a lot of people. The users most affected by this are the ones without a facebook account (we exist, believe me) and the ones who don't have any activity on reddit. Some of them have apparently even been waiting for a long time to be able to start Steeming! That is something that should be fixed to work in other ways as soon as possible.

Example:

Giving commenters incentive to write more quality comments

The users who are actively commenting on post aren't getting enough value distributed for their time. This is something that depends on who the author is, but given that most users here are actively curating, there is not much incentive to vote on comments as most Curators know that they most of the time don't receive any Curation Rewards for it.

There can be many reasons to this, not just the Curation Reward one.

Many authors stop attending their posts, don't interact with the comment section or do but don't give any value to them. I have seen this happen time after time.

Many Curators only have enough time to read content and use their voting power on that, eliminating any attention going to the comments.

There could be many other reasons, but what I want to say is that we have to start rewarding those users too (not just because I am one of those that comments a lot) but to increase quality in not just the content, but also the comment section.

A suggestion to a solution

I noticed at one point Steemians were getting rewarded with a big stake of the post's payout for commenting, what happened to that? Did we just decide to remove it altogether, only giving the early ones the advantage to grind their SP influence through commenting, whereas the new ones have to work far more harder for it.

Since we now have the reputation system working, why not re-implement this feature and share it equally among comments depending on reputation score. Maybe tweak it more so that votes from other users on your comments give you a bigger stake (not counting own votes) to further incentives users to provide quality comments to related posts.

This would also diminish the problem that Hive account@piedpiper was addressing earlier, there are a lot of votes on posts but probably less views and even less users that have taken the time to read the content before voting it up for curation power. Rewarding comments would be the best way to make users read before they vote, as I'm sure many of them would take the extra time to comment as well after having read/viewed the content.

Anyway, let me know what you think about the comment reward changes which I think would drive quality upwards in general on the platform.