But what surprised me was that while I made a few contacts, there were precious few responses to those 500 comments as there would have been in say, 2018.
Not surprising at all. If you are commenting on people who are only posting to get their drip of HIVE, many don't comment back. Even some of the very well supported don't comment as much now either. It has become a cultural thing.
What really bothers me is the copying.
Drop me links to these kinds of things and they will be sorted out. A lot of the copying are rewrites using AI writers, often of AI written content. People are ridiculous. When completely grammatically correct and vocabulary-rich content is coming out of non-native speakers - it should set up warning bells. Very few have the actual skills.
I have had variations of my work copied by one or two very well supported accounts for years. Since I don't post Hive content as often now, they are just on a repetitive cycle, adding nothing new - still getting support though.
However, I'm still here and havn't given up. If you look at my recent posts, my message is to keep plugging away on Hive, and so far that's exactly what I'm doing.
Work when others won't.
True and good advice from you. My concern about reporting was dealing with potential retribution from people with a lot more stake than me, so I just tried to post about subjects that they might not be interested in.
I'm surprised to learn that you were copied as well. This AI thing is nuts, and now I'm even seeing AI-generated comments from people who were posting in broken English just last year.