Maybe adding more stats to curation rewards and having how well you have done curating affect your reputation score?
There is already a perception that many people just "post" and leave.
I think this is cause authors get ~70% of the rewards while commenters and curators are left with less, if we could maybe go down to 50% for author, 30% curation and 20% comments, it would give people more incentive to comment on posts they can relate to.
Currently I don't see how commenters have incentive to comment with more quality content on related posts except for hoping many happen to read it and vote on it. In the cases of not even the author replying or giving a vote to commenters who took a lot of time to contribute, its really sad to see happening.
Edit: I just wanted to add to what I quoted, that I spend a lot of time here and I see a lot of authors, doing their 4 hit posts a day, going afk with 99% voting power and a couple people followed while having many followers. Leaves a certain un-personal trace after their articles and makes it look like its just a magazine you are reading now with random titles and content.
Edit 2: we really need an edit indication with a timestamp at least, would make edits a lot less confusing.
I agree and I'm more likely to upvote authors who I see active in comments and voting. If I don't see that, I consider the posts to be more "hit and run" or worse press releases and do not constitute quality engagement for the platform and in some cases I might even downvote it.
I don't think we need special incentives for comments as that will attract spam, but we do need to pay attention to who is adding value and who is doing hit-and-run. I do agree that the low value of curation rewards is part of the problem both for engagement and the value of STEEM (I objected to cutting them from 50% to 0-25% and I object to cutting them to 0% as Dan mentioned is being considered).