Steem Up, Engagement Up... Spirits UP!!!

What a difference five days make!

Here we are the price of steem rising and a general air of springtime optimism on the platform. Of course, there are still some gnarly growls from the underground depths. The old monsters muttering about rewards or The experiment but look at us now compared to where we are five days ago!

However. What I wanted to talk about was engagement in the days following the experiment. Specifically the social engagement of commenting.

It has to be noted that I am no expert and have nothing to back this up other than my own observations over the larger part of this last week. What I hope is that people have noticed the same thing.

In the days following the experiment when the auto flagging was happening and people were getting narked at 'losing' money from their original content that meant each post took three weeks to create sometimes a year, I noticed that I was commenting more on others posts as a general reaction to the issue. But more importantly, I noticed others were commenting more too.

In fact everywhere I looked I saw comments galore. Never has the six comment nesting limit hurt so much as people spark off conversations in comment threads and make valid or thought worthy points.

Obviously this is a fantastic thing. Steemit is a social network and it is great to see it being realised. There are two reasons that come to mind over why this is happening. Neither is ideal but ultimately have the same effect.

If that effect is a more social steemit with a fairer more balanced rewards system then I am all for it.

The first reason I think would be that as the whales have stopped voting people realise that they cannot just dump a post and run. Knowing that they will get a whale vote and automatically earn $20. As they are now more reliant on votes from fellow minnows, dolphins and or mini whales they have had to engage. By voting or commenting. A little cynical perhaps but heck. It gets us to that social model we have all been wanting. If someone is commenting in a transparent way just to get votes then it will be apparent anyway and not really work.

Incidentally, the above scenario reminds me of one of the people who posted a I am gonna quit if I don't get more money post. Ironically it was pointed out in the comments that their voting power was in the high 90's, showing that in fact whilst this person expected votes and money they didn't seem to be so keen on spreading the love. I hope that has changed!

The second reason is possibly more cynical but again that hardly matters if the engagement is thought provoking or witty or even just plain old nice. That is that since people's voting power is worth more people are actually getting paid to comment! That's right before the experiment comments could often be a sparse affair. Now that people know there is gold in them thar hills it has definitely been a driver I think for people to comment more. Comments now can often be worth more than the value of the post or at least a number of cents.

What does this all mean? Well for the moment, a healthier more vibrant social Steemit. I for one am loving it.

Whatcha think?