I have no way of knowing whether you deliberately ignored something I wrote1 on some Issue, or was it a Discussion?, whatever, microsoft website pageblob ... point is, there are several plausible reasons for people to care some bounded positive real2 amount about comments, even if the time spent agonizing over whether to zap from the same pseudorandom haze is worth more than that ignoring the refreshingly obvious advertisements3 all over the place.
The quote block is from some half-dead discussion, started by "ghost", about the possibility of automating zaps. I've not been around this website long enough to read all the top stackers' complaints, although I wouldn't be surprised if some people don't mind the implicit competition and channel backups, yet do consider zapping an obnoxious chore.
there are several different situations where you feel gratitude for the site providing you some item, rather than annoyance at the delay of interesting content:
someone answered your question; these aren't necessarily A:"..."/B:"...?"/A"!" reply chains, or A:"@B"/B:"..." chains, because you might have asked a general question and someone provided the answer unsolicited
someone already posted a reply saying pretty much what you would have, saving you the trouble of producing the wording, let alone the cost of posting it
media that wasn't necessarily informative or interesting, although entertained you
some comment wasn't any of the above and yet restored your faith in humanity [e.g. someone setting a good example by remaining courteous in a situation where nobody else was being polite]
obviously there are also random zaps, and sometimes conversations aren't utilitarian enough for my sterilised github imagination to figure out why they not only happened but kept people in SN rather than some unmonetized or even antimonetary site.
my purpose in enumerating the above scenarios is to help spec out the different behaviors that might be reasonable for an autozap; e.g., a sanely minimal autozap would credit a media uploader the cost of your commenting "LOL"
the sort of crazy idea I often have is that a zap amount could be computed from things like the mixing entropy of the comment chain, or maybe the differential increase in the mixing entropy that was added by your comment.
To any and all readers, and not only my dear Darth of Finite Patience, Boundless Wisdom, and Indubtbubble Wildernesse:
Please don't zap this comment, unless your main contribution to the conversation resolves epimorphically to financial data.
Footnotes
The entire quote appears in the main body of the comment, despite my failed efforts to leave it for the notes... guess I gotta visit ~meta sooner than sifting the wilds for ~gadgets and worse,.- ↩
yeah I was gonna write "rational" and then rethought the whole "what are micropayments anyway" noise; real problem, bounded complexity, positive effect ... definitely not ratiolol ↩
hatty professionals might quibble that they're promotional comments rather than strictly defined advertisements.... I could actually care a little bit less about the difference, although not much. ↩
Footnotes