I appreciate the discussion here.
However, and as you can probably guess, I am also not keen on the self-voting of comments. Your actions were brought to my attention by this post:
https://peakd.com/enagagement/@dalz/comment-rewards-or-how-is-comment-voting-doing
As you can see, you stand out like a sore thumb and rate highly amongst those rewarded by their comments. With Hive, we have a new opportunity to promote good behaviors and I think that voting on the comments of others will in time attract people to your content, likely with votes in return.
Interesting. I hadn't seen @dalz's post.
I take a different interpretation to those numbers... the amount of comment voting on Hive is embarrassingly low. There is no different between a post and a comment besides that a comment is guaranteed to be in reply to something. In that sense, comments can create more value IMO because discussion is what engages users. For example, take my recent Reddit post that was highly upvoted and look at the number of highly-specific and contextual comments.
I think posts get higher upvotes because much of the upvotes are automated with things like Hive.vote. We should all be trying to focus on upvoting comments to create discussion rather than automated upvoting of posts. The analysis by @dalz found "a total of 64k USD rewards on posts vs 1.1k USD rewards on comments." Do you really think only 98.5% of the value in content is from posts rather than comments?
I'm one of the only users on the platform that seems to spend the majority of their voting power on comments. Yes, some of that power does go to my own comments, which I invest time into creating (and due to the lack of comment voting are rarely rewarded sufficiently by other users).
Is there a way to see the percent of my comment upvotes that go to myself versus others? If you look at that figure, you'll see I do a lot more than self upvote.
I vote up a lot of comments, especially those on my own posts, but I do not self-vote on Hive. Who am I to decide if my contributions have value? A lot of my incoming votes are automated, but I value those who actually interact and that is to be encouraged. With a higher Hive price we can give out even more votes to comments.
Our community is small and those who appear to be selfish will stand out. We need to grow and that needs a better rewards distribution. We can earn pretty well from curation, so why not prioritise that? If the community grows and the price keeps rising then we stand to benefit.
Thanks @steevc for the input. It sounds like there is a strong stigma against self-upvoting of comments which I was unaware.
If everyone who self-upvotes gets as much attention as I've gotten on this thread, the practice could certainly be diminished on Hive. I have taken note and support your efforts to keep curation honest and focused on rewarding the best content.
You sound like a reasonable chap and there has been a lot of interaction I see between you and several other abuse-fighters.
You are right in saying, 'It sounds like there is a strong stigma against self-upvoting of comments', and if you were not aware then that is fair enough.
We would rather have you on 'our side' than to cause conflict. It is in the best interests of HIVE, trust us.