Comments are not rewarded like they were before HF21, so it's likely to decrease engagement. People are better off upvoting content after HF21.
Here's a comment from @bashadow that explains this in detail:
"For the smaller accounts SP wise (Under about 2300 SP) it is very hard to justify a vote at 100 % just to give a 2 cent reward, a full power vote is better spent on a person who commented on a post is to vote on one of their post."
That is also the reason I don't upvote comments anymore, which I honestly think is sad, because I have always loved the idea of rewarding my audience with something.
""Why %50 of my effort would go to someone else?""
Honestly, I think the only people who thinks like that are existing Steemians. I doubt that a newcomer would think like that, because they earn 0 from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms out there.
Truth to be told, I was thinking in the same lines too, previously. I saw HF21 as something terrible which would make things far more difficult for me and for all the lesser accounts we have. Due to many of the great things I have seen though, I have started to be less skeptical and I am starting to truly believe that HF21 was something good. That it was something we should have done a long time ago.
In a nutshell, HF21 have countered bid-bot abuse. People don't earn from spam or low quality posts in the same extent as before and those rewards are being redistributed to high quality content instead. Meaning, authors who didn't earn much previously, has started to earn more and anyone that produces high quality has a higher chance than before to receive upvotes. Especially as more people are looking for good content to curate.
However, I can still see that some people, perhaps some people who doesn't deserve it, have been affected in a negative way because of this.. But we need to take the bad with the good.
This is also why I recently wrote about Tribes too. People are basically leaving rewards on the table by not using tribes yet, and I definitely think that rewards from tribes can make up for the potential loss of rewards.
Like you said though, we need to wait. It will probably take us a few more months to see the true results of the recent HardForks.
I've changed my way to reward comments now. I don't upvote but UpFund with !UFM I think I should write a post on it too ;)
You can use UFM for posting and curating content on https://upfund.me or to get a vote from @ufmbot.
I think "like" is more valuable than 0.001$ upvote for those people on FB, Insta as such. This is kinda Ego > Money. I also think that Steemit or the idea of blockchain based platform has not been popular yet, but been more difficult to sustain on. I know many users from my country left Steemit due to price drop last year. Now reward decrease. Even if you put HF100 into use, people want to get the return of their effort.
You should lay the base very well before raise a building.
Posted using Partiko Android
We've had a building for a long time, but that building has fallen apart. Brick by brick, for a long period of time. The intentions of HF21 was not to raise a new building on that same foundation, but to strengthen the foundation, and raise a new building afterwards.
I get your point though, and I can understand your feelings. How many of those users are able to earn something from their content nowadays?
Also, while the price is low, you are able to earn more Steem. We are talking about tokens, not the value of those tokens.
That being said, I know more than a handful of people who gave up on Steem too. They gave up in late 2016 and the beginning of 2017. They gave up during the time we saw the record for the highest paid out post ever (~$32K), and they gave up because they didn't earn...
It's impossible to please everyone.