I tend to only comment on articles that I've read in full, and only when I have something to say.
Sadly SteemIt's monetization system really encourages bad commenting. A long and well thought out comment will use more bandwidth, will take longer to write, and will generally reap less rewards relative to the time put into it. In the time it's taking me to read your article, some spammer has written "plz follow and upvote" on twenty posts and is earning more than I am from their efforts.
When I see comments that are obviously copy-paste spam I have started reporting them to SteemCleaners. Its one of the only effective ways I've found to fight the platform's spam problem, and I get a dark satisfaction out of seeing spam accounts getting downvoted and blacklisted.
I disagree. The monetization system is well designed. It's the way people mis-understand it, that is the fault we have. Downvoting bot like "general comments" is something we could be doing. More higher reputation users like myself know this and I try to educate people about it as I go... This helps the entire system ecosystem I believe.
Try starting a new account with 0 followers and 0sp. I feel like it's a very different platform now compared to when a lot of people started. There's typically a 6-12 hour blackout periodevery morning when I can't post because of bandwidth usage. If I wrote shorter comments, I would not run into that problem.
I did start out a new account with 0 followers and 0 sp. It took me 1.5 years to get to this point.
I also didn't write multiple comments and multiple posts every single day..
I know how hard it can be for new people. Many of my posts have been re-steeming new users, giving advice, and helping people the best I can.
Please don't think for a moment I don't know how hard it is... I do know.
Here's a tip:
If you wrote longer, more personable comments, and less of them, you'd probably get voted higher up for those ones.
...which would cause less of a need to do quantity comments rather than quality.
Study your posters. Look who gives great comment awards after writing their post and who doesn't.
Look at my blog as an example. Look at what I did here today even in this post. I don't upvote everyone, but those that do, get quite a nice upvote for me if I love their comment.
I'm going to upvote yours too now, because I appreciate your concerns. Hopefully you can understand my stance as well.
I wasn't meaning to invalidate your experience. I know that a lot of whales haven't invested a dime into the platform and got to this point through sheer perseverance and hard work.
I feel that the difficulties for today's minnows are much more significant than those experienced by users a year ago. The bandwidth issues are extreme (sometimes I have 40kb to work with) and sometimes you'll earn a single penny on content that took two hours to write.
In no way do i blame the whales/dolphins for these issues. I've seen a lot of community support from large and small users alike. But the platform has some serious usability issues that need to be addressed if it's going to see growth as a mainstream social media platform.
I appreciate your detailled reply and of course the upvote.
Read this 8 month old post that a lot of people find helpful and still find it with google searches to this day:
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@intelliguy/if-you-re-new-to-steem-or-steemit-and-you-aren-t-making-hundreds-of-dollars-yet-let-me-explain-why
..and enjoy the great comments on it.
I'm so disappointed that it didn't ironically make 11 cents and get three views! :P
All valid points. I've made a few hundred dollars and 75 followers over three three weeks so I'm really not struggling all that badly. Sometimes it's just discouraging to see a two day old spam bot outpacing my account, or a cat meme raking in profits while my content goes unseen. I can be a bit of a pessimist at times. Sometimes that energy gets turned into complaining for no good reason, and other times it magically converts into real action and attempts to improve.
Thanks for the realistic perspective.