It's obvious to most of us that there is a huge problem with the rash of empty comments. These comments serve no purpose other than to elicit an upvote.

Users throw thousands of these comments out everyday in the hopes that they will get at least a penny with each comment. If you threw out 5,000 comments a day and you got a penny for even only one thousand of them you would still get $10. If you had a bot that did this on 10 different accounts then you would get $100.

Every day.

You wouldn't even have to do anything because it would be an automatic process.

Source: Giphy.com

So how do we determine these bot comments?

These comments have a few different things in common.

Sometimes they include your name so that they look like this....

"Nice! @jeezzle"

That's a good trick to make it look like somebody actually read the thread when they didn't.

They might look like this.....

"I like your viewpoint"

"Great share on this"

"Excellent post"

"Amazing work"

Of course we have our very favorite one that always makes me smile.

"Beautiful pictures"

I think the beautiful pictures one is absolutely hilarious especially when applied to a thread that does not have beautiful pictures in it.

I've even seen one on occasion that says....

"Wish I was there"

I remember my friend @marxrab posted a thread involving a bag of chips she had bought and received this comment....

"Wish I was there."

I remember chuckling while thinking about that. Wish I was there.......... in Tennessee........ in the middle of nowhere at a convenience store buying a bag of chips in a part of town that I'm unfamiliar with. Doesn't that sound fun? Wish I was there.

Most these people seem to have very low reputation that's because they keep getting flagged and rightly so.

Source: Giphy.com

It's really a shame we have so many people posting this way.

The problem is that you might run into somebody that really did think you had an amazing post. If they write "amazing post" down then I wouldn't want to flag somebody that is just being lazy but actually read my post.

I would only want to flag somebody did something really terrible.

To be honest I'm really against the idea of flagging anyone at all.

So my new policy is going to be that I will no longer upvote any comment that does not directly reference my post.

So if you're used to posting....

"Nice post"

"Amazing post"

You can rest assured that you will no longer get my vote.

I'm not going to flag you either. I'm just going to let you sit there because I think that you are a bot and several people are using these bots in order to cast out thousands of comments from thousands of computers somewhere.

Thousands of worthless accounts posting worthless comments.

Meanwhile the whales don't even seem to be swimming in the ocean anymore throwing out their high dollar votes.

Instead we're just surrounded by meaningless comments looking for a penny here or there. They add up I guess.

Let's see how many meaningless comments I can get in this thread.