I've had this thought for the past couple of days.
And yes, I actually do spend time thinking of suggestions and improvements for this site.
A while back, I got a random comment on an unrelated post about my fiction chapters where the commenter said he likes them. He's never left me a comment on the chapter posts themselves, though - so I had no way to know.
It got me thinking. I've read posts on Steemit, as well, that I've liked, but I never left a comment saying so. I often don't even bother to upvote anymore since I see all upvotes in the current landscape from accounts with less than 150k SP to be pointless. But I realize that's just me.
I've never left those comments because, at that particular moment, I couldn't come up with a short book's worth of things to say - which lead me to think that since I don't have enough to say to form a lengthy and thought-out comment, it would be spam.
We know what happens when you just leave a comment on Steemit, saying "I really liked this post, I enjoyed reading it".
However.
Whenever I upload some of my gaming stuff to YouTube, I'm super happy when I receive a comment that simply says "Wow, dude, your gameplay is excellent!"
Why is that?
On Steemit, that would be spam. Hell, there's probably an automated flag bot that would get triggered for that. It probably comes down to a couple of factors. One, on YouTube, there's really no incentive to comment other than letting the author know you liked the content. Therefore, I know that whoever left the comment, actually did watch the video, and is commenting because he or she genuinely liked the product.
Two, on Steemit, it's so unlikely that a post gets read - especially if it's over 50 words, and doubly so if it includes difficult words - that we're already highly skeptical whenever we receive comments. On a site like YouTube, we assume that people watch the videos because that's what they're there for.
However, part deux.
Despite genuine spam being annoying sometimes, I wonder if the anti-spam culture is actually discouraging legitimate engagement. Sometimes we don't have anything more to say other than the fact that we enjoyed the content. And as someone who produces stuff, I really, really, really love getting the comments from people who take the time to rub my ego the right way.
The way Steemit works - from my perspective - is you can get a good feeling here in two ways: the whale vote, or the engagement from the smaller users. The small users can't give a meaningful vote, but they can be meaningful by engaging. The whales are too busy and generally don't give enough of a fuck to somehow engage with the userbase. And that's fine.
I don't think a comment has to be a short novel, honestly. Sometimes all we want is some acknowledgment from people for the stuff that we created. Sometimes, a simple "Good post" is more than enough.
I realize that Steemit is different than other sites because, by and large, people are here to pump the reward pool to the best of their abilities and not to consume content and engage - but I feel we should ease up a bit on the anti-spam defence league movement, and just let people engage.
Also, isn't up to the poster anyway to moderate his or her comment section? Why are there bots and communities and whatnot dedicated to moderating other people's comment sections?
If you feel your comment section is shit, but lack the STEEM Power to flag everything, there's an incentive to buy and power up.
See? I just helped the STEEM price.
You're welcome.