I'll chuck into the mix my idea that I call "reverse curation". The impetus for the idea is the frankly bizarre concept that a post only has value for 7 days after it is posted. The reverse curation idea would offer a way for posts that remain popular after 7 days to still receive some rewards. It would particularly benefit the case where a post by a minnow earns nothing and is viewed by no one in its first 7 days, but then goes viral say 3 months later. In these cases the original post essentially 'curated' all that value being earned in the comments section.
How it would work:
After the 7 day reward window has closed on top-level posts, 25% (or whatever was appropriate) of author rewards on comments facilitated by the original post goes to the original author. Without doing the maths, I'd assume the 'reverse curation' system would have to be limited to top-level posts, as applying it all the way down the comment chain would quickly see more nested comments earning zero rewards for their authors.
And just to add to other voices here... something needs to be done about the vote-rings and comment spamming, and possibly SP delegation. If the latter was tackled, it would require some loose guilds of whales to step into the gap and directly fund worthwhile projects on the blockchain by directly upvoting their output.