RE: Top 12 Things I Didn't Know I Would Be Doing On Steemit
Yep. At that point, the only thing you can do is wait it out.
There's certainly an element of guilt or something to it. It's also just the general idea of, if I want someone to upvote my post or comment, then I should be willing to reciprocate. In reality, it's more of a courtesy—I want to engage with you, so here's my $0.03, or a way of saying thanks for replying.
But since the vast majority of comments go without being upvoted, even when engaging with higher SP (so it's not as much about voting power at that point as some philosophy or voting strategy), it's morphed into my way of providing the person I'm engaging with something for their time.
It's kind of weird how that all has unfolded over the last six months, but that's basically it. :) And I can't do it nearly as much when STEEM values are down and cutting into how I much I can spread my vote around. It only gets worse the lower in SP from me you go.
I think exactly the same as you. Wish others did as well though.
Yeah, that's a whole other can of worms, now isn't it?
I haven't seen it verbalized as much lately, but for a while, I was running into comment threads discussing the actual worth of comments. Basically, the idea was, no comment is worth an upvote, or very few, which would then put that comment up to the top where others could see it and potentially upvote it, too.
Kind of creating a trending comment.
While I've upvoted comments on their value or merit, engagement is such an issue here that I just like the idea of encouraging it. If someone replies and gives me something to work with—doesn't need to be long, but it needs to continue the conversation—then I think it's worth some kind of acknowledgement beyond my response.
So, there's the upvote virtually every time mentality I find myself in versus the upvote virtually never concept, with all points in between, including subjectively determining when to do any of that. :)
It would be great if we could a group of 500-1000 who all had the ability to upvote regularly and then just see where it went. Although, getting upvotes isn't the only reason for commenting. There's so much else that can be gained from it, that it can become it's own reward, and then gain rewards indirectly through more post curation.
The main thing is to keep commenting and see where it leads, I think. That's the theory I've been testing out for about 2.5 months now. So far, it seems to be having some results. :)