Thanks for reminding me about commentrewarder. I'm going to try it for the first time in a post I'm planning. I like your comprehensive list of commentrewarder benefits and I agree with the ones you list.
I've been here 8+ years and I did reply a Lot more back in the early days. Most of the people I was interacting with in the comment section have left. I reply a lot less but sometimes I do a reply with many more words than my normal posts.
Regarding rewarding commenters, I have UP voted many/most of the comments people have left on my posts, to reward the engagement. I suspect some people comment on my posts because they know this, and would not otherwise reply.
I like commentrewarder because the rewards come from the author and not the reward pool.
There is something similar going on for over a year at @tokenfaucet. Replies are rewarded by private funds and not the reward pool. Their last post from 9 days ago got 308 replies. Many are just the !TF reply that triggers rewards but there are also fun conversations that spontaneously arise.
https://peakd.com/giveaway/@tokenfaucet/higher-rewards-tokenfaucet-giveaway-is-now-bigger-and-better
Anyone can check it out if they want. You'll need to have a reputation of 30+ to get a reward. That's the only gatekeeping that goes on. Anyone with a rep of 30 or more gets something for free. Unless there's a major run on the post and the account's tokens run out!
Let's see how your experiment goes! Feel free to try the @tokenfaucet experiment. Have a nice weekend! :)
I hope it works. I hope something works!
Thanks for the @tokenfaucet reminder... it's one of those that briefly slid across my radar, and then vanished into the mists again.
I try to reward good comments, as well, but it's tricky for those who like having engagement on their posts, but lack sufficient HP to upvote a few comments above the dust threshold without burning through all their voting power.
Gamification of the whole social sphere does seem to have an impact. Asher's Curation and Engagement Leagues sometimes generated as much as 6-8% of all Hive curation activity during a given week... and people were very loyal to it, to the point where it became a subcommunity within the community.