NOTE: This is not by any means me dissing the "Fast Reply" service. I simply got the idea from it, but other than that, this has next to nothing to do with the service itself. I'm sure it's a fine service.
Read the above again before proceeding further.
That said.
Something about the attitude of it being hard work to reply to people commenting to you rubbed me the wrong way. Don't misunderstand: some of it had to with dealing with the blockchain limitations, which can get annoying for sure.
But the idea of people making $500 of absolutely free trash money per post finding it "hard work" to reply to people who bother to leave comments and engage is still ehh to me.
Again, nothing to do with the service or the - I'm sure - fine developers responsible for creating it. That simply sparked the idea.
If there is an attitude amongst some content creators that it's an annoyance and an inconvenience to reply to people - and I'm not talking about the spammers, I'm talking about the fine people who actually read what you create and bother to leave a comment - then those people really need to get over themselves, in my opinion.
It's not an inconvenience to get comments. Hell, I'd say that genuine comments on Steemit are almost a damn privilege if anything.
Remember: these people bother to leave a comment. They bothered to read your/check out your stuff.
Yeah, I've had a few trending posts myself (back in the good ooooole days) and I think I got over 200 comments once, and it was tough to take everyone into account. Although most of the hard work aspect came from the fact that the site simply clogged to a freezing halt after too many comments.
That said, I really tried not only to reply, but to reply with non-generic shit. Keep in mind that these were trending posts that earned me triple-digits - we on Steemit often forget how damn unheard of this is for what are essentially pretty worthless blog posts on the internet. Those rewards partially happened due to these people reading it, engaging, and voting. So, to treat these people as an afterthought is just so hideously arrogant that I don't even know what to say.
I actually sometimes do go through highly rewarded posts on the trending page and I could drop a few names right now who never ever engage with the people leaving comments.
That's one of the easiest ways these days to get added on my Muted list - growing every day, by the way.
It shines through from these people that dumping a few shitty photographs or lines of text once a day is just an excuse to either self-vote or milk autovotes. And that's that. I find it hard to respect that sort of behaviour. And people can scream "free market" and "anarchy" all the want; as a free market actor, I have the right to choose who to respect and who not to respect as an individual.
Hah, gotcha! I can play that game, too.
But hey. Since automation is clearly the way to go, and we the direction seems to be more efficiency and less effort, why not just develop a service like Fast Reply that goes just a bit further?
As the wise owl @ocrdu said here we can evolve Steemit to a point where no human input is even necessary. Just let the bots handle everything.
Someone should develop a similar service to Fast Reply that bypasses the blockchain limitations but in addition to that also automates the comments.
Just a "Thank you!" after every comment, automatically.
God forbid people making risk-free CEO money for blog posts should ever need to bother engaging with their content consumers. That's almost like work.
No, that's for the peasants.