I mark every comment as helpful -- although I wish there was a rating scale. My reasoning for marking every one is that the photo was successful in making communicating with the individual -- in whatever degree or fashion they received it in -- and they wanted to reply to the communication. Regardless of the content of the comment, that is a success on my part; even if they didn't like it, they were impacted by it. As I progress that may become less and less important -- but I doubt it.
On a similar note, I track the percentage of helpful comments I give. It was up around 80% until I participated in a comment drive and commented on every photo in the 'Color Studio Portrait' challenge. Now it is sitting at 68%. I haven't commented much since then, but not really thought about it much. This thread has me thinking it had more to do with my not leaving many comments since then than I would have thought it did.
I didn't know why it dropped so much, but it did bum me out that I went to the effort to give thoughtful and 'in depth' critiques on every photo and got this as the result. I think I know why they were not received so well now. It has long been stated by many that forcing comments would be bad (the quality of the comments would drop), but I had never thought of a voluntary comment drive as being a matter of leaving compulsary comments. But it is, in order to complete my pledge to comment on every one I had to comment of all of them -- even the ones that had no impact on me at all. That made those comments pretty useless -- both to me and to the one receiving them.
I will be commenting more, but I won't be participating in any more of the 'comment on every image' drives that come up every now and then -- percentage drives might be different though, as I would be choosing which ones to comment on. I think a percentage drive would be more useful anyway; from the standpoint of it being likely to get more participants, if from nothing else.
David
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