I don't think it makes very much sense to "reward" comments.
I personally enjoy commenting, and although my own sense of greed would for sure make me personally like having more rewards for commenting, as far as objective functionality goes, I don't think that this would improve Steem very much.
Perhaps modifying how comments currently work could be fine, in order to fine-tune the system, but I don't really think that a person should strive to make a living just from comments. Increasing their payout by some measure, or otherwise tailoring the system to encourage good discussion is reasonable, but I don't think there's enough money flowing into Steemit as a whole to allow comments to take even more from the limited pool.
Of course, if we were to get a bunch of investors to greatly increase the price of Steem, back to $1 or more even, that would completely change things, and I would have to revise my opinion.
I might say, because there are so many comments, but it's expected that everyone would comment, it ends up making payouts remain fair. People who blog still make money, and the same people who blog, can also make money on comments, as well as people who don't blog.
That would end up splitting the payouts greatly between the thousands of comments, versus only hundreds of articles. This could end up good or bad, depending on how much Steem is worth. If the economy here is very generous, and people are able to make decent amounts of money, I think spreading the payouts out between more people would be wise.
But if money is tight, and even bloggers can't make a living here, payouts should tighten to only people producing stories.
I think it could be wise to try running some ideas in a simulator sandbox. All of these options should be tested before implementation, right?
If more people can earn steem I think it is very good for steem. I agree the system needs improvements, and I wait patiently for that as I know that there is a lot to test in this beta phase. As for money going into the system, I'm not sure I know what you mean... STEEM is created by the system, and that happens the same regardless of the price of steem. This has the potential in my opinion to attract investors who could increase the price.
Since steemit is in beta, we are the simulator sandbox. This is the experiment and we are the beta testers. I wouldn't worry too much about the price when it is so early in the experiment. The more people we can distribute steem to, the better opportunity there is for the price of steem to improve.
The money that goes into the system are people willing to spend bitcoins or USD to buy Steem.
If no one wants to buy Steem, then even a million steem will be worthless.
So no matter how fairly it's divided between commenters and bloggers, neither will have much reason to even use Steemit, if they can't take their Steem out of Steem and spend it elsewhere.
Imagine this: The Steem produced on Steemit is for sale. Outside speculators buy as a total, USD $100 per day. This means there is only USD $100 to go around to all the content creators each day. There are 50 people total on Steemit.
If 10 of those people are bloggers, then they can each potentially take home $10 USD , give or take a few, and the commenters, the 40, take maybe $1 USD total.
This means that content creators make the money. Commenters make spare change. $10 USD per blogger is a fine amount to live on, right? That's lots of money per day, in this scenario.
But if we were to divide it equally, and all 50 people make lots of Steem, but there is still only $100 USD going into the system, it means that each person is only taking $2 USD home.
That's not enough to make a living on, which means that bloggers, people who are the ones who are supposed to make the good content upon which to comment, will go home. They don't want to fight over such tiny, spread out scraps.
This is how it would work right? If I'm imagining the wrong idea, let me know, but as it sounds, it sounds like you'd divide up the meager amounts of money flowing in even more than it already is.
This would make Steemit unattractive to serious bloggers.
Unless, like you said, it ends up increasing the people who invest in Steemit.
However, I think that late-game, it will be corporations that buy-in, in order to get people to subtly advertise their products and services. This means that comments won't be as important to the major corporate buy-ins, at least how I see it.
This would prevent them from wanting to buy in, if their buy-in has to be that much more to compete with the share of the reward that goes to commenters. It will take more SP to have influence over individual bloggers, which would reduce the size of major buy-ins, or completely prevent them.