Hey Acid!
I would like to comment on two aspects of your post. The first one is about the following:
Say you found a funny photo on the internet you think would make for a good base of people editing and having fun with it into different scenarios/ideas/relevancies and the edited versions would be shared in the comment section and that was what the community would be about - to reward the comments rather than the main post that was just a share of someone else's photo (preferably credited of course).
Did you know something similar already exist on Hive for almost two years. It is based on CC0 images (so that it is slightly different) but the principle is the same. The organiser shares a picture, and users use it to make a collage. There are hundreds of participants every week, so that we can consider this as a great success. Please check out the LMAC community managed by @shaka.
As a side note, we joined them for a special STEMsocial edition 10 days ago, and we were amazed to see more than 160 entries to the competition (see here and there for the STEMsocial related posts; you can find similar posts in the LMAC community here and there). This is IMO very good for a cross-community social experience and audience increase for both involved communities.
On the other hand, I really liked a lot the idea you proposed:
Now what the bot would do, is after payout of the post and all comments, it would calculate 1. amount of voters and voting strength on all the comments and take the $20 post rewards and tip them out to the whole comment section based on "proof of brain" curation in the comments. Author would get some of those rewards back, comments and discussions would get part of it as well on top of the normal upvotes they've received from readers/the author.
AMAs would definitely fit in this category, and it would be great to see engagement being rewarded in this case. I have plenty of ideas along these lines (of course all being based on science and physics), so feel free to reach me out if you want to put a real-life test in place (once technical details will be sorted out of course).
Oh cool, yeah that does seem similar and I've seen some of those posts around but never looked deeper into them. I'm personally not a big fan of creating new posts for each edit, just feels like it would make them harder to find and since we're on a linear curve nowadays we could put more emphasis on comment voting. Though not so much that people start trailing those as that always looks weird to have tens of upvote comments while other comments in the same thread only have a couple.
Also thanks for the offer, I may take you up on it but will first check with the dev that first showed interest, though he is quite busy these days so chances are he won't have the time, but will just do it out of courtesy.
Just to make it clearer, I was more referring about organising a test AMA session where the rewards are shared with the commenters in one way or the other, than really implementing the technical part.
I could however manually (and quickly) code something in Python with Beem to start with. I have ideas about the how-to in practice, although the specifications may need to be thought first. In any case, the full project is something worth to be tried out ^^