Hooray Monday! Rewarding Thoughtful and Helpful Comments on Monday Posts

We've heard time and again how important leaving comments on posts you really liked helps in engaging with the community. I have also made an analysis to show Comment Payout having a 7% share in in reward pool from inception in March 2016 till December 2017. The trend suggested though that Comments is slowly taking more share of the reward pool in recent months moving from 4.8% in the first half of 2017 to 8.4% in the second half of the same year. I still feel that comments are underrated, and this is due to two main reasons - unrelated, upvote for upvote, follow for follow, and obvious copy and paste repetitive comments; and lack of engagement both from Parent Authors and Comment Authors.

For some weird reason, I always wake up feeling exhausted on Mondays. It does not matter how great or how mundane the weekend prior was, Monday has always been my least favorite day. Here are a few reasons why I think this is the case:

1. It is the first day of five that I spend away from my family, working in an odd schedule that does not give the opportunity to spend waking hours with them.
2. It makes me spend half (or more) of Sunday stressing about how my work email is filing up, and the weekly reports that are typically due on Mondays.
3. It is a siren signaling that "hey you fool, you are not truly free, time to pay your dues".

Now in my final six weeks in the corporate world, I want to create a transition to my views of Monday, and potentially share that transition to this awesome community.

Hooray Monday! is a comment curation effort that aims to promote engagement on posts via commenting. I am dedicating a day's worth of voting power each week for this initiative.

Mechanics:

• @steemnest, which is @steemph hub for content creators, will be used as a trail for this initiative. Right now this will be trailed by @steemitph, @dandalion, @steemph.manila, @steemph.davao, @dandalioncub, @littlesteemitph. At 100% upvote this is worth $1.88. We will reach out to the community to support this initiative for the next 8 weeks. The trail will be set in Steemauto.com and we will only use maximum of 10 upvotes per week spread acrosss Tuesday and Wednesday.
• @steemnest will have a #hooraymonday post every Monday for the next 8 weeks, where Steemians can reply with links to comments on their on their own posts. The comment should not be more than 3 days old. This will ensure that we will still be able to upvote the Comment Author's comment. We will review the comments based on the sets of criteria defined below, and select the top 5. Both the Parent Author and the Comment Author will get an upvote from the trail. The 8 accounts mentioned above will upvote at 100% weight using up their entire day's voting power for this initiative for the next 8 weeks, guaranteeing at least $1.5 worth of upvote with Steem price being at least $4.
• For this week, you can leave links to comments on your Monday posts in this announcement, and visit @steemnest from next week onward.

Sets of Criteria

• The Comment Author who left a comment on your Monday post should have reputation level 55 or lower. This is to ensure that this initiative will reach the relatively new users, and reinforce the value of thoughtful commenting. There is no limit on the Parent Author reputation. The Parent Author have the option to indicate that they are declining upvote on their comment in exchange of an upvote to the Comment Author's recent post.
• It should be obvious in the comment that the Comment Author read the entirety of the Parent Post. - 25% Weight.
• The comment should either Add Value to or Genuinely Express Appreciation of the Parent Post. We want to teach the practice of what you yourself would want readers to do with your own post; read, appreciate, and try to add value. - 50% Weight.
• The Parent Author responded to the Comment Author's comment in a thoughtful manner. - 25% Weight.

This initiative serves as an introduction to a similar curation effort of @sndbox; @sndbox-alpha - driving the importance of engagement towards the end of the first half of this year, please read the announcement and schedule in Announcing the @sndbox-alpha Curation Initiative.

The following are the themes that were selected through a recommendation process:

January : Art + Music
February : Meetups + Philanthropy
March : Philosophy + Writing + Literature
April : Education + Science
May : Steemit Comments

Credits:

Is It Monday? Image - Pixabay
Hooray Cover Photo Background - Pixabay
Bullseye Arrow Image - Pixabay
Yellow Umbrella Among Black Image - Pixabay
Sndbox Alpha Image