The problem is how the ping contest got percieved as spamming for others, most of the ping comments were just spam, neither were original or intentional, you just pushed people to "make engagement" but is a phony and lame excuse of engagement, and some curation teams dint find it "cool" or "nice", That is why i woulnt join your effort but i did found it quite cool and a bit of a good idea as well, but the idea ended up getting a lock of backslash for reasons i dont know.
The problem is how you got percieved with this idea, and the reasons i can think of are the following.
The profits of the contest, The fee of entry on the contest allows to be possible on theory to actually have profits for the account of comet ranker, that in itself is something most people wont like, especially the extreme politically correct faction of hive, who are in the most part, those dv you have.
People like free stuff, basically having a "Fee" for joining of X number of hive per Y level is the anathema of how a ""Hive contest works" so far, a more Lmac way to approach it would have actually be better, having commenters use peakd and place a share of the profits to the comet ranker account would have being better...
Is kinda intrusive to make comments that are anything but honest or sincere, im a hardcore commenter as you have noticed, in fact by the time you proposed a coments curation proyect, i had being part of another curation proyect for comments since about a year, hispanic community have a while doing it actually, the contest that they made to get more engagement ended with a lot less of backslash, havent done another one in a long while btw, i should push elcomentador to do another one.
So you think i find intrusive to comment? No, i find intrusive to comment on every follower blog, Most of my followers are either phantom accounts, curation proyects, curation team members and some naturally ocurring followers(These is my target public). Only the last section is worth commenting on, Commenting on bots, abandoned accounts or similar things is completly useless, making that as part of your rules also heavily influences on how your contes got that bit of backslash.