Thank you for your reply @ninaeatshere from time to time I do comment on others travel blogs and sometimes my thoughtful comments are ignored. I see people commenting on my blogs who have read them and put time in to write something thoughtful and will often comment back, even visit their blog and follow them if they are interesting. Sometimes I look at all the blogs from the top selections of the day and comment on a few that are unique and of places I'd want to go or people who travel like we do. Understandably most are of places that I have already been or have no desire to go to.
Often the comments on my blog are of poor quality and they are just from people fishing for an upvote. Look above out of the 4 comments, 1 is an incomplete sentence where the person didn't even bother finishing their thought, two of them are about the sounds of waves, which tells me they only looked at the first photo and are talking about noise instead of travel. Only 1/4 is somewhat decent of a comment and you can tell they at least looked at other photos.
We can't relate to half the people writing here as they are more interested in getting a few cents from upvote then travelling to coastal California which is one of the most expensive destinations on the planet. I don't mean to sound arrogant but the people I am interacting with either live in Western North America or are traveling somewhere we are going to and travel like us. My next vacation is to Grenada, I don't see a single pin there. We are pairing it with Barbados, there is one pin from 5 years ago. We are also going to Costa Rica and Panama but we are staying in private luxury villas or 5 star top rated hotels and are not the yoga/hostel type beach bums. Not everyone travels the same way we do.
On that note one thought to improve worldmappin would be to break down the type of travelling. Budget, Adventure, Luxury, etc. I know you can search by tags but people tag all sorts of things that really doesn't describe the type of traveller they are. To be fair, my partner arranges most of our travelling and they are not interested in going anywhere that is not of exceptional quality or beauty. Seeing more of Spain is on our list and we are figuring out a European vacation next Summer but will be going much further East this time.
Hello again @crypticat, you've hit on a very interesting issue here, let me say that I very much agree with the way we generally see an attempt to reflect superfluous engagement within Hive, this however, is what I would like to try and change, but of course it's a job that will take a lot of time.
I am glad you took the time to tell me how you see the reflection of this, when others comment on your blog, it is helpful for us to understand your point of view as a frequent user. It would be great if when someone stops by a post, they do it out of interest and enthusiasm, as you describe you actually do.
As for your suggestion about the travel category filter, it is an interesting idea, I take note of it, because we plan in the future to expand features of the map to make it more useful to all travelers who access it, both inside and outside Hive. We can't promise anything concrete yet, but we could consider a different way of filtering types of experiences.