it's almost the million dollar question! Id like to share my thoughts from my experiences over the last three years.

back in 2017 when i was getting going with ecoTrain and Steem in general.. the engagement was really sometimes overwhelming. The number and quality of the comments made everything 10x more exciting and dynamic.

As im sure you are aware, slowly, step by step that got eroded. THe gradual decline in the price of Steem lost quite a lot of people, and then.. what was it HF20.. that we had mana introduced .. that change changed everything.. and from that day things have never been the same commenting wise..

i would say the right now a much large proportion of the people using Hive are here for rewards.. and MANY are from other non english speaking countries like nigeria, philipines and more...i think a lot of these people are not so comfortable writing english.. some have learned to use google translate,.. which does an amazing job.. and i see so much engagement from them.

so maybe one thing i would reccomend is to integrate language translation in any post.. it could be a simple check box that just says "Translate and add this post in english". and the translated version could be appended to the end. Probably there are other or better ways to do it.. there are many services that could be integrated.. maybe the google API allows remote connections or embedding..

Your idea of putting a percentage of the post rewards to the comments is an interesting one! I think that might just do the trick in terms of getting more engagement going .. what i do wonder about is not so much abuse. but more about the less popular posts getting even less engagement than they do now as everyone starts commenting on the top posts... but maybe somehow it could work out..

My final thoughts.. i always noticed that a rise in the price of Hive leads to a flurry of activity and engagement.. so we may also have to be patient as the rewards really do make a big difference.. and as they go up we start to draw in more people who are here also for the community and networking side of things..