Last weekend I had felt something I didn't feel for a long time. The reason: my most recent post (here) on our offspring chain HIVE. Not because I like the content of the post so much, but some real interaction took place with the number of comments going though the roof!

Ok ok, I may exaggerate a little since 32 comments may not be that much, but I've not seen that many comments on one of my posts for a long time! And it is not the number of comments, but the conversations as such that made me feel positive and happy!

We Need Engagement!

^{published at Facebook (source)}
The only way to make STEEM a sticky service for all of use and especially for newbies, is engagement. This doesn't mean just responding to comments on our own posts. We need to reach out to other users posts!

Curating and voting is not enough to keep people onboard. Money - whether it is little or considerable - isn't everything!

I think money is just a very temporary thing. Although some people think humans are driven by money, research shows money is not making us happy. Sure, when we receive a solid boost on our post we may become a happy dancing user, but a few weeks - or even days - later all that happiness will likely be lost again. Especially when the boost was a one time event.

Such boost to be a one time event is very real when we grow our community, since the amount of STEEM that we distribute daily, will not increase with more users, more posts and more votes. The more posts and comments available to vote for, the less money will be rewarded - in average - to a single post/comment. More users will therefore result in less value per post. Simply fact!

In any way, when we grow, we'll end up with less money in our buckets. Therefor money can never be the reason for us to stick to our community at STEEM.

So: what will keep users coming back to STEEM for; To keep on playing around in our community?

The most logical thought is interaction / engagement! This logic I saw in action myself this weekend and noticed how much I loved it! Several users took the time and effort to read/view my content and took some of their time to write a comment which resulted in various conversations. Some of them even went a bit further than writing; A little drawing was created and embedded in one of the comments.

I think I'm not be the only one who can become happy when real interest is shown. Sure, maybe some of us don't like interacting, but isn't being part of a digital community just that? Interactions?

Therefore we shall assume many of us and therefore also many of the newbees (most of which we still have to onboard, but I'm looking ahead of time already), do like the interaction. Even though engagement levels are rock bottom at the moment, existing users may stay active for their own reasons, but do you think newbees will stay around long when nothing happens around their posts?

The only Correct answer is a firm: NO

^{published at Pexels by Daria Sannikova (source)}

I think I can speak for all of us, we want to grow STEEM tremendously! As already established, the only way to do this is by creating service stickiness and as also pointed out before, for this we need engagement.

Why don't we start spending some more time reading and responding to posts? Why don't we give some happiness to other users by showing real interest? You would be when someone else showed interest in you, or your content!

Sure: It'll cost Time to Engage

When you don't have that extra time, why don't you reduce the number of posts you write?

Don't know how it is with you, but whenever I write and publish a post, it takes easily two hours of my time. Two hours! 120 minutes! When I would spend 120 minutes reading posts and writing comments, I can easily handle 24 posts (assuming an average time of 5 minutes to read a post and write a comment). Whether you also take 2 hours for your post are not, the amount of engagement you can have in the same time as it would cost you to create and publish a post, is always a few factors larger.

So why not skipping a few posts and use the extra time to spend on going to other users posts and engage?

It would be sooooo cool if we can lift the 1 to 2 comments per post to lets say 5 or even 10 comments per post. Numbers are not unreal, since those who are here for a few years, know engagement levels were much higher two/three years ago. 30 comments on a post back then was more the standard, then the exception.

Let's Spend Time to Engage!

Don't forget to vote comments
Even a tiny vote is nice to receive
But a large vote is for sure not a no go! :)
And No: This is not a request for vote on my comments; I prefer a conversation over a vote

CU Under the Posts ;)

an original

_{qsounds music library with more than 300 entries | A...K | L...Z |}
^{steem curator for illuminati-inc / qsounds}