They'd comment to start, but when the OP or whoever zaps them they'd get nothing - unless the comment was in the 77th percentile or better of zapranked comments for the day. We could make rewards less competitive to compensate (which makes sense as the reward pool would be larger).

My main hesitation is that I'm skeptical the wallet ecosystem/lightning is ready for the average joe.

It's interesting that CCs aren't very different from this approach - CCs end up in rewards pool eventually too (assuming they aren't used for territory fees). CCs just give the bearer influence over when and how - which probably feels a lot better to our average joe.