"but even rating comments on how well they are liked? popularity factor. everyone would be upvoting the whale comments and commenting on them looking for a bonus. or upvoting friends."
I think you missed my point here, or I'm misunderstanding you. The idea is to determine POST curation rewards partially by who makes the "best" comment. Voting for whale comments would be the opposite of "looking for a bonus" - you'd be lowering your comment coefficient for that post by giving the whale more curation rewards. Of course, this does institute a "prisoner's dilemma" whereby commenters will not want to vote on other commenters due to competing for the same curation...
"perhaps we should give credit to those who write comments that spawn discussion?"
This is precisely what I'm suggesting, although the admittedly imperfect way to judge that is pending payout of the comment. I'm open to suggestions. We can't do something like number of replies, because of bot-spam, but we could do total pending payout of all replies (child-comments to that comment)?
ahhh. ok i misunderstood. i think we can agree on this but... how to easily judge best comment? who decides?
We want to keep it simple. If "pending comment payout, minus self-vote amount" isn't good enough, what else can we use?
I mentioned total payout of child comments, but many threads have no child comments and they rarely have many payouts...
it seems if we use this, we might need a few disqualifiers like, "great article, keep up the good work"
Comments like this should get down-voted.
I started downvoting them regularly when I stopped caring about my blog, reputation level, flags, etc.
It was kind of a relief to be released from the social pressure of conformity.