Following up on my recent post I wanted to write out a quick idea to get some feedback on.
The "problem":
Many stakeholders don't have a lot of voting power as authors, they cannot vote comments past the minimum threshold for them to get rewarded or to properly thank them for their time. Hive price is also low which makes it harder to cross the minimum threshold.
There are solutions like feeless tipping, but with the whole curation being the main thing on hive where we can direct inflation with it, tips aren't common.
Writing out comments takes time, at least those done well. They also verify in some ways that the commenter has consumed the post which is valuable as we lack consumers. Going out and rewarding comments of others with your votes, if you're in a position to give bigger votes, is challenging and takes time without any additional rewards and at times it may come off weird to the author as they may not agree with the comment you decided to reward since comment rewards are the default way to organize the list when new viewers open the post.
A potential "solution".
This solution can come in 2 ways I can think of right now.
Most authors get rewards on Hive and posts are the go-to way to reward them. Autovotes and trails mostly only vote on posts as well. One solution could be for the author to place a small percentage of the post rewards as a beneficiary to a certain account, let's call it @commentrewarder. When placing rewards on this account, the account would record which post sent it rewards, it would then scan the post's comment section and look for the comments you as the author have upvoted and split up the rewards based on weight of your comments.
Example: I give 10% beneficiaries to @commentrewarder in this post. I upvote 2 comments in this post, one at 20% upvote, the other at 10%. When the post pays out, 10% beneficiaries are sent to it, let's assume 100% powered up post for simplicity and it results in 10 hive to commentrewarder. It then scans my post for my voting activity on the comments and gives the two comments 6.66 hive and 3.33 hive, maybe taking a small fee for the service.Solution two, you don't have to send it a beneficiary but instead an automatic comment is placed on the post by @commentrewarder. If upvoted by the author it triggers the bot to activate and curators/potential whitelist gets the comment some additional votes. Then it'd work the same as above, it scans the post for other comments and liquidates the rewards to send out as tips to the other comments in the post based on the authors voting preference.
Okay, I personally think solution 1 is better for starters at least as it doesn't generate new rewards from outside help for that particular author but takes a percentage of the post rewards to give out more to the commenters for authors who can't vote that high themselves.
Now let's get into "pros and cons"
pros
You give lower staked authors a chance to reward their engagement by forfeiting part of their post rewards.
Curators who notice the beneficiary may vote your post higher knowing you're attempting to reward your engagement.
It re-introduces something that existed at the very beginning of this chain, where part of the post rewards would automatically go to comments on that post but it at the same time gives the author the power to decide where to apply them based on their votes which can be tiny (1%-5%) as not to waste much voting mana to their already low stake.
Even authors with higher stake could make use of this.
It'd give a lot of new activity to the "tipping" command which many front-ends highlight and display, making your older post look richer in rewards if they receive engagement with comments being filled with tips. At the same time normalizing tipping which there's not a lot of activity of in this space since curation is king.
Engagement could become more distributed, people wouldn't just focus on the few who can give bigger votes to spend their time consuming their content while ignoring others if they prefer to get some rewards for their time engaging. Thus it could increase engagement and consumption levels overall which wouldn't be a bad thing.
cons
With solution 2 it wouldn't look nice to have a bot comment at the top if it has been upvoted in an effort to distribute those rewards to the other comments. This could be fixed if front-ends decided to tag and split bot comments apart from regular users in the comment section.
Posts and comments take 7 days to pay out so the tips would occur first after 7 days which means most people won't see the rewards until then. This could be fixed with an "upfront payment" by the author, basically loading up the @commentrewarder bot in preparation to tip comments on their next post based on how they vote them.
Some abuse could occur with step 2 if someone else votes the comment if author is a bad actor and only uses alts to self-comment and upvote their alts to direct those rewards towards them, it would need curators to check things over in that case before rewarding the bot comment.
With these new incentives there could be a rise in AI/bot activity leaving low effort comments that weren't manually generated with authors having a hard time knowing if they should reward it or not, other non-genuine comments could rise in activity as well.
Potential other pros and cons I may have missed, please let me know!
I've squatted the @commentrewarder account in case people like the idea and we'd wanna give it a try, a dev would be needed and some rewards for the work.
But let's see what the feedback is first and what your general thoughts on it would be, thanks for reading!