Time To Bring Upvoting Comments Back (For Those Who Can)

Thanks to the changes in the EIP, it was noised around that upvoting comments might be a waste of time, principally thanks to it being harder at the bottom of the curve to get a comment with a single upvote over the dust payment threshold.

So, I stopped upvoting comments. Between the EIP and the continuing stagnation of STEEM value, my upvote amounts are at the lowest point since I started, that despite the fact I now have over 10,000 SP at my disposal. Nothing more discouraging than to see the power to reward a post decrease even as your ability to do so increases.

However, I've seen others leaving upvotes, some of them on my own comments, so I started doing it more consistently. After a couple weeks of doing so, I found out a couple of things.

One, my voting efficiency rate as measured on steemworld.org increased, which meant my curation rewards did, too. As you can see, on all of the comments, they hover between 49 and just over 50% efficiency every time. It doesn't seem to matter when the upvote was made, either, as the ones above range between 44 minutes and nearly a day.

And I verified that the top comment was actually paid out today, so my $0.02579 STU actually made it over the dust threshold. For me, it takes at least a 30% vote to do it, though 35% really should be the bottom end. Those are higher weights than I'm used to giving to most comments, but at this point, it is what it is. If I'm going to continue to do this, I want to ensure that the comment author is being rewarded.

All of the amounts in the above image correspond to comments, except for the last one, which was a post.

This image has more upvoted posts than comments and you can see more variation in STU, efficiency rate and resulting curation rewards. The top two are both posts, but you can see that even though my vote weight is 35% on each, the STU and SP are quite different, thanks to the elements mentioned above. That does mean efficiency can go higher, but so can the opposite.

The lowest efficiency values are all on posts, even though the vote weights are similar or slightly higher. So, it's not as nearly as consistent as what happens on comments.

For Your Consideration

Many here have mentioned they believe engagement is down. One of the reasons for that, amid many perhaps, is that upvoting comments has fallen off dramatically. After seeing what can be done by upvoting comments, I will continue to do it, and would encourage those of you who have dolphin-sized SP and above to do it as often as it makes sense.

There is also @misterengagement back online to reward comments with, too. The creator of the token, @abh12345, made the announcement of its return here. You do need to have 1,000 ENGAGE tokens in order to invoke the payout, just as before.

I think it's time for engagement to make a comeback. I think it's time for those who are primarily autovoting to consider following those votes up with some commenting, if they aren't already, and for the rest of us who have been commenting all along to continue, and raise the bar a little if we can.

STEEM is still more a social media platform at this point based on the amount of user activity. But can it truly be social without engagement?

How about we bring back the upvotes on comments, and in so doing, bring back the social in social media.

_{Images source—steemworld.org}