I was starting to see a lot better payoffs after HF19, but now it seems to have cooled off a lot. And people seem to be commenting less because they seem to feel obligated to upvote when commenting, so that means more users are just getting ignored.
Funny thing is, I haven't upvoted myself since before HF19. I don't feel any temptation to, either.
I guess I'm just really boring and everyone else is just too concerned with the illusion of increasing their earnings by self-upvoting? Because overall, it doesn't seem to actually increase earnings. It just looks like it does.