Very well spoken! Enagement should be the backbone of the whole game here. I'm not sure where we lost the plot. Of course we all need to have top level posts of our own. But the true community is in the comments.
I think people are massively undervaluing comments, and responding to comments, and UPVOTING comments. Just look at it from a pure greed perspective. If you vote on a comment, and are the only one to do so, then the entire curation payout of that comment comes back to you. That's a win right there isn't it?
I've been a slacker at keeping up engagement in my posts, but I hope to get back to it one of these days.
Your point in the comment about Facebook is really on point as well. We've (Steemians as a whole) stopped caring about each other, aside from the value of the upvote you wield. If we don't care, we don't engage. Then this just becomes another blogging site with little else to recommend it.
Keep on being thoughtful! Maybe the rest of us will catch back up. Hahaha
Thank you Mike! You know that when I do write about my first year in Steem you'll have a very prominent and important place in the timeline!
I remember getting like $3, $4 and $8 upvotes on comments on other people's pages... and it wasn't always the original poster that was upvoting. It was almost random, and super exciting... I really felt like I was contributing to a deeper conversation.
I feel like maybe services like Smartsteem and MinnowBooster changed people's minds from rewarding content they enjoyed to more of ROI focus... or maybe with the downturn with the crypto-market people decided to Steemauto votes to people they knew were getting strong upvotes. I'm not really sure. I just know that every day brought the promise of super interesting and thought provoking discussions.
I know it's been super rough for you with the new(ish) job and surgeries and stuff, but I'm sure you'll get back into the swing of things.
I completely agree with you about the curation benefits of upvoting comments. I really wish I could work out the math of upvoting a comment versus upvoting a poster that always gets a @kpine vote.
It makes sense that Steemians stopped caring about each other... once people get sizeable auto-upvotes, it becomes more about the churn than the engagement, which means the quality drops dramatically, and it's hard to care about people when you know their heart isn't in it.
We need more heart!!!
Thanks so much for reading this post dude! So excited to see your comment!