Finally, we have a counter for the unique views that a blog post gets. Well done, I have personally suggested this in the past.
Here's the post in case you you missed it.
For me, views and good commentary are much more valuable than a huge amount of upvotes. Therefore I think there should be an incentive to encourage actually reading the stuff before upvoting, or to discourage mindless upvoting more. I have no idea how to implement those, but one idea that comes to mind would be to have the ability to upvote until you've opened the post; you could still see the potential payout and the number of votes in your feed. Though this will likely decrease the total amount of upvotes as it would be less convenient than now, I would argue it will keep "the game" more open and sincere.
I may be wrong here, but I've noticed YouTube doesn't register your like if you press the like button before you have watched the video a certain amount of time.
But besides, what's the point of giving an upvote when you're not fishing for curation rewards? Yes, you're give support to an author but have you really appreciated what the author has written?
Comments are good, but it can be annoying to see someone with a huge SP wallet give you a nice comment and skip the upvote.
One of the features of Steemit is the potential reward for contribution to the platform.
While that should not be the only reward (as you said, it is nice to get positive comments as well), a high payout upvote retains contributors.
So we have a balance that I don't see a useful mechanism to maintain: rewarding quality work balanced against curation reward strategies. And we can't discount the draw of curation rewards to investors.
So it does come down to responsible curation by the folks with the fat wallets. If you see something good, upvote it. You can't control the behavior of other curators, and if you try to do that and that results in their reward strategy becoming less efficient, you face the possibility they take their investment out of the platform.