One of the side effects of the #newsteem is less engagement, less comments on people's posts.
That's in part true because fewer authors keep rewarding people who engage with them on their posts with an upvote. Don't blame the authors for that, it's a side effect of the new economic system, which isn't as bad as enough of us thought at first, just bad for engagement.
At the same time, with or without a reward incentive to comment on a post, people find themselves having less time to do it. It happens to me. Manual curation does take time. Time one can use to... comment, for example.
For now, this is just a remark. Not saying it's good or bad people seem to prefer more curation to engagement.
The side effect that I really don't like these days is that many posts have more bot comments than real human comments. If we add to this the comments that only invoke bot commands, then we don't set a good picture for anyone looking from the outside in.
Plus, if real comments are no longer upvoted, they will be "lost" among a plethora of bot comments and bot invoking commands. Why would this person bother to comment again next time?
For a few days I started to use @CommentCoin to reward comments on my blog. But I wonder: do they reward known bot accounts as well, for their comments? I hope not!
The other thing I'll start doing is to upvote all the real non-spam comments to go above bot comments, for visibility. Sorry, in 99% of the cases they will be around 1% weight, so below the dust threshold, but enough for visibility purposes. Hopefully the CC token rewards will compensate in time.
