For instance let's imagine the community Ask Hive that I created a long time ago but most of the time doesn't get a lot of attention or traffic.

There have been a couple of attempts at this. Musing was the first one and it was pretty decent, but they totally mismanaged the funds and it kind of went to crap. That was back when the Steem Inc delegations were around. They could have built themselves a decent runway to keep it running, but they got greedy.

@reverio is the latest attempt at something like this and the team seems to be going about things the right way. I see them doing a lot of promotion and things like that. I think the biggest key was always giving users the option to have their questions show up as comments versus actual posts.