A few things Witcoin did that are relevant here.. based on my recollection (from over a decade ago).

With Witcoin, all fee revenues were split. The "house" (Witcoin service) got like 10% or something like that, then some percent went to their charitable foundation fund (like 2% or maybe 5%, I forget) and the rest to the contributors.

Those who created Posts (OP) got revenues from the upvotes for their post as well as from the comment replies.

Top level comments got revenues from upvotes for their comment and from those comment replies below. But the revenues for these get split, like 80 / 20 of what is left after the cut for the house and charity, commenter gets 80% and then 20% to the parent (OP), "upstream" or something it got referred to as (since "upline" / "downline" are scammy MLM terms that nobody wanted to use).

So lets say a commenter got a $0.10 upvote. House gets $0.01 (10%), charity $0.002 (2%), commenter gets $0.0704 (70.4%), and upstream (OP) gets $0.0176 (17.6%).

Second level comments got revenues from upvotes and the comment replies below them, same 80/20 split, 80% for 2nd level commenter and 20% to those above. So a $0.10 upvote for this 2nd level commenter ends up: House $0.01 (10%), charity $0.002 (2%), 2nd level commmenter $0.0704 (70.4%), upstream gets split top level commenter $0.01408 (14.08%) and OP $0.00352 (3.52%).

Third level, ... fourth level, results in, of course, less and less earned by OP, as a percent of revenue, for each increase in level of reply.

This made it less costly then for someone to comment. Sure, the fee to reply might have been $0.10, but you might earn $0.05 combined from upvotes and revshare from those replying below. You could even earn a LOT more (percentage-wise) than you paid. You could pay $0.10 to comment, and earn let's say $0.25 in revenue (profiting $0.15, or 150% ROI) for your effort for your reply. This had the effect (sometimes) providing value by composing a fantastic reply.

Think of certain high quality answers you might find on Stack Exchange, Quora, or Reddit -- not often, but sometimes wow, fantastic work! That's the type of stuff some people were putting on Witcoin, because they were earning some decent bitcoin for a really good comment. A big difference, however, was that in early 2011, the only way for a lot of people to obtain bitcoin was to try to earn it -- they didn't have access to Mt. Gox (e.g., no fiat method that worked for deposit), and Mt. Gox was about the only exchange at the time. So some smart cookie putting an hour into composing a decent answer to someone's question in the Bitcoin Q&A category was not unheard of.