There is a few more thing I wanted to suggest.

To create 2 differents type of upvotes. An upvote where you give the post money and another upvote where you just give a normal like. Maybe you can use 2 signs, a thumbs up and a heart.
This is very important to keep people happy and motivated knowing that even if they didn't receive money their post was liked by many. If you look at a site like reddit it is easy to get many upvotes if you post a nice comment, here on steemit.com however the comment section has no upvote because curators can't make money off of it . You could even integrate different type of emoji so people can tell how they felt about the post.

Also i think the voice comment concept by steempowergirls is interesting, if people had the option to record their voice when posting a comment i think it will make the whole site more lively and it's a great innovation.

The last idea was to put steemradio player on your site ( steemspeak), it would be awesome if any users could get his message heard by millions of users ( hopefully). Also a community radio player on the site would strenghten that community feel and would make the site more real/lively.

Anyway just my 2 cents.