I think it has come the time to talk a bit about vote distribution and how I see it on Hive...
I don't speak for Hive in general, but from my perspective and for what I do and why I do it this way (and why I will make some changes in the future).
I strongly believe the resilience of HIVE grows the wider its distribution is. And the way to distribute HIVE to more hands is to vote on more people.
Sometimes I am torn by this, because some content or authors deserve a higher vote from my part based on the quality of their work, and usually my max weight is 30% on full posts to allow me to vote on more people.
Then, I also vote on most of the comments written by humans on my posts, mainly because I appreciate comments and this is a way to show my appreciation (besides replying to them), but also to stay consistent with my idea to distribute HIVE as wide as possible.
However, I couldn't help but noticing something that started to happen on my posts but also on the posts other other people who value interaction.
And that is the proliferation of low-value low-effort comments, sometimes unrelated to the post or making no logical sense.
In the past, I sometimes decided to ignore such comments every once in a while, especially from regulars, on the principle: if I can spend 2 up to 6 hours to write a daily post (the latter for my weekly roundup), you can write more than 3 words in a comment... 😉
Generally, I reply to comments, but if all I can find to say is "thanks", it's likely there wasn't much to stir a real reply.
This situation has been on my mind for some time and I admit I don't like to distribute upvotes on 3-word comments only to keep spreading HIVE far and wide. There are other ways to achieving the same or wider distribution.
I probably would have postponed talking about it as I often did, but Zoltan (@ph1102) reminded me about the issue in his comment.
I don't know what is true... People don't like to think or don't want to think, as Zoltan mentioned, or they don't want to get involved, don't have or don't want to share their opinion, or simply as I replied it's a matter of trying to achieve maximum with minimum effort. In any case, we all need to raise our bar. That's the only way up, instead of down.
I mentioned at the beginning of the post some changes in the future. Going forward I'll make more differences regarding my upvotes on comments than in the past, and there will be a higher number of low-effort comments left without an upvote. I will also start to upvote some exceptional posts with 50% too, instead of the max of 30%. Still trying to spread HIVE as far and wide as possible.
How do you feel about low-effort comments on posts?
Want to check out my collection of posts? (work in progress!)
It's a good way to pick what interests you.