Introducing CommentWealth: encouraging community, discouraging spam

Comments are such an important part of the Steemit community. In fact, comments are where our community takes place. Because we see Steemit in this way, Hive account@geke and Hive account@jimitations are initiating a project to encourage and upvote quality comments. We're calling it CommentWealth.

Please note, at the outset, what CommentWealth is not:

• This account is not a bot (though it may evolve into one)
• This account does not follow anyone
• This account does not upvote posts

Instead, CommentWealth will post comments and occasional project updates, upvote the quality comments of others, and occasionally flag comments that spam, bully, or pander. (As CommentWealth and its voting power grows, you can request its help in flagging or discouraging comment spam by contacting Hive account@geke on Discord.)

This project started in response to our own comment challenges. How could we encourage thoughtful comments and discourage spam on our posts? In our Hive account@geke and Hive account@jimitations accounts, we started double-upvoting every quality comment our posts received. This was back before we delegated some of our Steem Power out to Hive account@minnowsupport, and we were able to give our readers a total of about 1 SBD just for making an engaging comment. We did this for several reasons. First and foremost, we wanted to reward the interactions of our readers and followers. Second, we wanted our readers and followers to realize that interacting with us was a profitable endeavor for them. This would encourage them to come back and read / watch our content in the future. Third, we wanted to move the comments of our truly-engaged readers and followers to the top of our comment threads, pushing bot / spam / pandering comments down to the bottom. But ultimately, we wanted to encourage community and get to know other people on Steemit, and we figured rewarding good comments was a great way to do that.

In fact, rewarding good comments is one of the best ways to encourage community and get to know your readers.

There's been a push recently on Steemit to find ways to reduce and disincentivize comment spam. We're hoping that CommentWealth can play a part in that!

In addition to pushing spam comments to the bottom of any thread, the first line of direct defense is to politely ask spammers to stop. This is what we intend for the CommentWealth account to do whenever we encounter spam. When necessary, this account will also flag, and we hope the Steemit community will help us accomplish this by upvoting CommentWealth updates so our reputation number can withstand any backlash spammer flagging. The real benefit of CommentWealth in discouraging spam, though, will come as the account grows and we're able to help minnows who don't yet have enough voting power to discourage spam comments on their own. Plus, if CommentWealth flags a spammer, it can take the burden off minnows to be the "heavy" when they receive spam. Similarly, CommentWealth can help minnows reward their readers with more steem-powered upvotes than a minnow would typically possess. Ultimately, we hope CommentWealth will encourage minnows to engage with their readers, which is the best way to grow a presence and succeed on Steemit.

We're not entirely sure how CommentWealth will evolve. It might eventually work better as a bot, or possibly as a collaboration of humans, much like @OCD works. But we'll figure out the most productive way forward as we start experimenting with the project, finding out what methods work best.

For now, this is a strictly human and very subjective endeavor. We're looking for comments we deem to be helpful, thoughtful, and community-encouraging. But these are subjective judgments, so please bear with us. We're more likely to use CommentWealth to upvote comments in which the post-creators are trying to reward interaction with their own readers through both upvotes and replies. Tip: to get the attention of CommentWealth and to encourage our upvotes on your work, get to know us in our own comments section and engage with our update posts!