Thanks for reminding me about commentrewarder. I'm going to try it for the first time in a post I'm planning. I like your comprehensive list of commentrewarder benefits and I agree with the ones you list.

I've been here 8+ years and I did reply a Lot more back in the early days. Most of the people I was interacting with in the comment section have left. I reply a lot less but sometimes I do a reply with many more words than my normal posts.

Regarding rewarding commenters, I have UP voted many/most of the comments people have left on my posts, to reward the engagement. I suspect some people comment on my posts because they know this, and would not otherwise reply.

I like commentrewarder because the rewards come from the author and not the reward pool.

There is something similar going on for over a year at @tokenfaucet. Replies are rewarded by private funds and not the reward pool. Their last post from 9 days ago got 308 replies. Many are just the !TF reply that triggers rewards but there are also fun conversations that spontaneously arise.

@tokenfaucet/higher-rewards-tokenfaucet-giveaway-is-now-bigger-and-better

Anyone can check it out if they want. You'll need to have a reputation of 30+ to get a reward. That's the only gatekeeping that goes on. Anyone with a rep of 30 or more gets something for free. Unless there's a major run on the post and the account's tokens run out!

Let's see how your experiment goes! Feel free to try the @tokenfaucet experiment. Have a nice weekend! :)