In four years of being here I rarely ever voted comments. Every hard fork made voting comments less attractive. First there was the 30 minute window where early votes would sacrifice curation rewards. This wasn't as bad as the later hard forks as at this point the sacrificed rewards would go to the author you voted, not so bad.
This window was later reduced to 15 minutes which was an improvement to voting comments but sacrificed rewards would go back to the reward pool, so neither the author or the voter would receive them. This change meant you would have to wait 15 minutes to vote on a comment to avoid sacrificing a good portion of your influence.
Down the road the window was reduced to 5 minutes. This was reasonable with the content we have, but a curve was added to heavily penalize small votes. This curve hit comments the hardest, rightly so as they were the most heavily abused by farmers. The curve would penalize small votes as much as 40%+ reduction in vote value and ultimately curation rewards. This discouraged authors from voting on comments of their content unless they can make it over the curve with larger $1-$2 votes.
Hard Fork 25 changed a few things that made voting engagement on your content more attractive. Hard Fork 25 removed the curve completely and removed the 5 minute reverse auction window. This means if you get a discord notification of a new comment and open, read, and vote to it in under 5 minutes, something that is very common with Gina Bot and F.R.I.D.A.Y., you will be able to give your full vote value and receive full curation rewards. Not only that you don't have to worry about vote snipers that know you are going to vote comments on your post.
I believe people who engage on your content are the most important users to you in the community. I think rewarding comments goes a long way to make them feel appreciated.
While I fully support these changes, they do mean we have to be more vigilant about abuse. It is a lot easier to hide 10 $0.50 self votes on comments a day than it is to hide a $5 vote on a shit post.
