Sometimes I’ll just up or down vote so they know someone at least read it.

For one, there shouldn’t be a requirement for a poster to also constantly reply to all replies. It’s cool when it happens, and I do it myself from time to time when I have the energy to do so

All contributions to the Lemmy-verse, no matter how small or how many replies the OP does, are welcome. It’s important to attracting more users

For 2, by “select few” I mean as in something that actually contributes to the convo rather than just replying for the sake of replying because that’s how you end up with super generic replies that nowadays people wonder if it’s an LLM writing it