Engagement. We have heard it over and over again. Engagement is crucial. If the platform wants to thrive, engagement is needed. Engagement is what creates bonds and user retention.

Making a meaningful comment on other people’s post can go a long way. Pro tip for newbies: Post a little, comment a lot.

But. One of the cons of the HF22/21, the curve and 50/50 split is that comment rewards are being hit. Let’s see how are comment rewards doing these days. Do people vote comments?

The period that we will be looking at is April 1 till April 14, 2020

The first two weeks for April. That period is also payed out, or out of the 7 days payout window.

Number of votes

Here is the chart for the number of votes on posts vs comments.

Not sure if you can see but there is a second column down there with a bit of grey color that is the number of votes on comment. Yes, barely visible.

A total of 1.94M votes were casted to post vs 19k votes to comments.

Or approximately 1% of the total votes. Not very encouraging for comments isn’t it?

Here is a close up on just the number of votes on comments.

As mentioned, a total of 19119 votes in a period of two weeks on comments. On average a 1360 votes on comment per day.

Comments Votes Value

Compared to posts the number of votes on comment are low. But what about the overall value. Are these votes more valuable than the vote on posts maybe?

Note: Here we will be looking only in authors rewards, or half the usual rewards that are showed up

Here again the comments rewards are barely visible against the post’s rewards. They are at the bottom with a bit of greyish color.

A total of 64k USD rewards on posts vs 1.1k USD rewards on comments.

Interesting enough this is almost 2% of the rewards. If you remember the number of votes on comments is 1% from the total.

The average vote value per post is 0.033 $ and the average vote value per comment is 0.06 $. Well that is one pro for comments 😊.

Here is a close up on just the rewards on comments.

A total of 1150 $ rewarded to commentators. As mentioned above these are just authors rewards, excluding curation. The average daily rewards are around 82$.

From a perspective of number of unique account rewarded, there is a total of 1902 accounts that received a comment upvote in the period, or 434 daily average. Compared to posts were there was 4646 accounts upvoted, or 1762 daily average.

Top 20 Comment Authors Rewards

Who are the authors that received the largest rewards on comments?

Here is the table.

Rank	Author	Rewards $
1	steemcleaners	227
2	hivewatchers	72
3	supergiant	22
4	dhimmel	20
5	double-u	17
6	abitcoinskeptic	16
7	foxkoit	15
8	mamalikh13	15
9	flugschwein	11
10	rockor	9
11	jaki01	9
12	hlezama	9
13	intrepidphotos	7
14	justineh	7
15	marfonso	7
16	vieanna	6
17	furious-one	6
18	xxxxxxxxxx	6
19	chriddi	6
20	steevc	6

Comments are sometimes being used for autovoting and milking. As we can see from the table above these seems not to be the case on Hive. Steemcleaners/hivewathcers are on the top here as a support for their work.

The third account on the list is maybe the only exception for comments abusing, although not at some high amounts. Al the other accounts looks pretty legit, although the rewards are not high as well.

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What can be concluded from the above is that the overall comment voting and comment rewards are low. Although compared to the specific vote value comment votes are higher. We know that the large portion of the voting is now automated, and the votes go to posts.

Should comments be reward more?

No wonder we have seen a lot of comment rewards tokens coming up lately, like beer, coffee, engage etc. The market seems to be working on filling in the gaps. Although sometimes these comment rewards bots can look like a spam, making it harder to find and read the actual comments. Would love to see much shorter comments from them and with smaller font size.

All the best @dalz