it's almost the million dollar question! Id like to share my thoughts from my experiences over the last three years.
back in 2017 when i was getting going with ecoTrain and Steem in general.. the engagement was really sometimes overwhelming. The number and quality of the comments made everything 10x more exciting and dynamic.
As im sure you are aware, slowly, step by step that got eroded. THe gradual decline in the price of Steem lost quite a lot of people, and then.. what was it HF20.. that we had mana introduced .. that change changed everything.. and from that day things have never been the same commenting wise..
i would say the right now a much large proportion of the people using Hive are here for rewards.. and MANY are from other non english speaking countries like nigeria, philipines and more...i think a lot of these people are not so comfortable writing english.. some have learned to use google translate,.. which does an amazing job.. and i see so much engagement from them.
so maybe one thing i would reccomend is to integrate language translation in any post.. it could be a simple check box that just says "Translate and add this post in english". and the translated version could be appended to the end. Probably there are other or better ways to do it.. there are many services that could be integrated.. maybe the google API allows remote connections or embedding..
Your idea of putting a percentage of the post rewards to the comments is an interesting one! I think that might just do the trick in terms of getting more engagement going .. what i do wonder about is not so much abuse. but more about the less popular posts getting even less engagement than they do now as everyone starts commenting on the top posts... but maybe somehow it could work out..
My final thoughts.. i always noticed that a rise in the price of Hive leads to a flurry of activity and engagement.. so we may also have to be patient as the rewards really do make a big difference.. and as they go up we start to draw in more people who are here also for the community and networking side of things..
Great comment man but I got to point out that your own reflection on the experience here spells out what reality is here.
That almost all Life has escaped this place. Which is why rewards on comments long ended.
On my own experience I reflect when I joined too. I read some posts by @suesa that triggered a thoughtful response from me. Then not long after I got a $10 upvote from @blocktrades that made me think, "shit this thing might just be the real deal"
Anyway that was back before blockhead turned completely evil and decided to only leech money through the services that '@ned the fat toad' granted him a monopoly on. Because when that blocktrades service launched, even suesa stopped getting shit all from him and it essentially saw her get pissed and eventually leave the platform!
So to me that's the failure of this place in a nutshell. It was really organic with the rewards early on.. then sharks said,
And the lack of comment rewards leads to a lack of comments, and eventually people stop posting because it's discouraging to scream into the void. Aka why my blog has been rather dead.
Yeah that's so true and so sad.
I think you should include yourself in discussion. The inflatable whales can't pretend it's not an issue if the entire community keeps repeating the same issues.
Which is what is happening.
I'm sure many old "steemians" still visit too, wondering if those issues are fixed and just maybe the many honeybees get recognized as the true value of this platform/concept.
Oh I did take part in the discussion. I worked with different communities trying to fix it. I talked to people. Without success. Don't have the energy to fight windmills forever.