I tell all new people to comment. This is a great way to gain a following as you get to know other people. Newer people are often dismayed when they write an article which only receives a few cents (if anything at all). They fail to grasp the concept that nobody knows them. Unless you come over with a following like 
Therefore, I will state it in clear terms for newcomers:
Spend A Fair Portion Of Your Time The First Three Months Commenting In Other People's Posts
Of course newcomers are not the only ones who need to comment. Steemit is in dire need of plenty more comments for a few different reasons. The first obviously is the interaction. Without comments, articles are dead. However, once commenting occurs, conversations can arise. Suddenly, the article has life to it.
There is another, more pragmatic reason for comments. Comments help to drive traffic.
Please take a look at the latest Alexa.com ranking.
The other night I wrote a post where Steemit ranked #1000 in the US; it moved up 55 places in a little more than 48 hours.
That said, there are some stats from Alexa which are more telling.
There are many on here who spend a lot of time scouring Facebook, Youtube, and Reddit in an effort to drive traffic. Yet the stats tell us that Google (along with India) account for more than 20% of the referred visitors. Google still controls the Internet and who sees you.
Why do I bring these points up?
Google has a bot that they send out to comb the Internet. Part of the ranking system is how big you are and what keywords you align with. Certainly, with so many people posting on such a variety of topics, Steemit ranks with many different topics. At the same time, the more articles that Steemit has, the bigger it gets. Think of it as a glacier. The more often Google bumps into Steemit, the better it ranks.
Article size is important for Google. One of the big reasons is that Google likes to rank links that answer a variety of questions at once. Consider it one stop shopping. If an article can cover a couple different areas providing the answer the searcher is looking for, that is more valuable to Google. Therefore, a well-written article of 1,000 is better than one of 75.
Another interesting fact is that Google does not know when the article ends nor does it care. How often did you click on one of the trending articles and scroll down to the comment section to find a comment you left a few minutes before? You keep scrolling...and scrolling...and scrolling. To you this is tedious; to Google, it is nirvana. Google loves that and will give that article a higher ranking.
To Google, it is all about information. Articles that have a ton of information end up with the highest ranking. This is why Wikipedia is almost at the top of every search. A Wikipedia page tends to be long and cover a variety of topics. It hits on two major areas for Google.
Facebook tends to do the same thing. The sheer size of Facebook in terms of pages means that Google is running into it all the time. Like here, someone posts something on Facebook and 500 people comment on it. While many of them might be dopey, there are usually a few well-written, longer comments. That adds to the size of the post in Google's eyes.
The best thing we can do for the growth of Steemit, as posters and commenters, is to do more of it. There are people handling the marketing on the other social media sites which is yielding an impact. However, combined those efforts are not even netting the results of the Google spider. If we can take each post and an 33% more to it by commenting, this will lift all of Steemit's rankings higher. Obviously, after 20 months, this site is finally getting big enough, from Google's perspective, to be moving up the ranks.
Let us all do our part by leaving a few extra, pertinent comments today. A paragraph or two can go a long way to catching the "eye" of the Google bot.
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Picture by Google Images.