How should Searchfunder address low quality comments?

Hey Searchfunder Community!

We're constantly trying to make Searchfunder work harder for you. We know that some users take advantage of our novel "free-if-you-post" mechanism and earn free access by consistently posting non-substantive comments. We occasionally see some people commenting random punctuations marks or even emojis. We flag this whenever we see it. Such users are probably not aware that we still try to read almost every post and that their comment history is clearly visible on their full profile page for all the world to see.

Our free-if-you-post mechanism is designed to encourage as many substantive comments as possible. And many times short comments are, indeed, substantive. And we certainly don't want to penalize anyone who generally makes substantive comments just for occasionally making a short one, .e.g., "congrats on acquiring," "I just sent you a PM," "tagging so-and-so," etc. Sometimes short comments are entirely appropriate.

We're trying to crack down on those serial abusers who consistently make non-substantive comments and never make substantive ones. We are aware that it clutters up notifications on posts-your-following, is very annoying, and generally makes Searchfunder much worse.

How should Searchfunder address low quality comments going forward?

Should we ban such accounts?

Should we merely flag them as low quality?

Or should we just live with them as a necessary corollary of creating a heathy ecosystem where we try to maximize substantive comments instead of minimizing non-substantive ones.

It's devilishly difficult to maintain an open collaborative community that doesn't devolve into spam. We're lucky we've made it this far. We need your help going forward!

Thank you for your insights!

With Best Wishes, ^redacted‌