Rewarding someone for their time

I stumbled upon this video today which I found explained really well about a certain scenario in the dating world. This might be something that refers to American culture more than European, but I'm sure its not completely excluded. A person in the audience asks the speaker at what point in time during dating should the woman start paying for her part of dinner. The way she phrased the question and the timeline she had in mind made me as baffled as the speaker, but I really liked his response and it reminded me of an aspect here on Steem as well that I wanted to talk about.

Here is the video, taken from the speakers youtube channel, Matthew Hussey.

My time is worth more than yours so you should pay for it. I wonder what paradigm that sets up?

I'm sure this is something that many of you have been familiar with at some point in your life. There is often a sense of entitlement that grows from one side of the relationship and they get used to having the other pay and take it for granted.

I'm not really the dating expert myself and I believe the speaker nailed it pretty well, but there is one thing I've noticed on the platform that bugs me from time to time that I wanted to discuss.

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When I write posts, I often try my best to read through most of the comments. I see this as people taking time out of their day and browsing experience to go ahead and comment on a post of mine, share their thoughts, raise interactivity and discussion and most importantly prove to me that they have read the post. Not only does this filter them from the users trying to spam in hopes for rewards, but it also sets an example to many other commentators that this is how things should be and that they should adapt if they want to possibly earn rewards, else they will have just wasted their own time and that of the person who has written the post who has to read the comment that is completely unrelated to it.

Similar to in the video, if you're Steem Power isn't that high or your voting power is depleted. It doesn't matter if you aren't able to reward all comments as much as you'd like, its the gesture that's most important. Replying to comments and continuing the discussion leads to a healthy post, platform and userbase in my opinion. Not only is it in your own interest that the post gets a lot of interactivity since there might be an algorithm that determines it being "hot" or "trending" on some platforms due to it (not sure if that has any effect on Steemit yet) but it also shows that you aren't just taking your followers and commentators for granted. There are many authors I stumble on daily who come in, write their post and just leave for the day never to return to the countless of people commentating on it. It shows that they either don't care, only care about the rewards or really don't bother cause they think much higher of themselves than the users commentating.

Of course there is a difference from author to author, many might be posting content on many different sites at the same time or really are that busy that they can't reply to all the comments. Reading doesn't take as much time though, and the gesture of even rewarding someone with 0.01 $D goes a much longer way than completely ignoring most. Especially on this revolutionary platform that makes it possible to reward your followers and commentators with monetary value. Showing them that you've read and appreciated their input is very important, not only for their Steemit experience but also for your own since it won't discourage them from posting on content in the future again.

There are of course exceptions, if you write a killer post that gets hundreds of lengthy comments on it, no one will be get annoyed at you not being able to get to all of them. If its something that continuously remains the same way though, you as a commentator should not encourage that kind of behavior and move on cause that author might not appreciate it in the same way as others do and especially on a social media platform it shouldn't be accepted.

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Thanks for reading, as always I really appreciate your discussions and comments to my posts, even if interaction might not interfere with trending algorithms here yet. :)