using social proof and visual cues to increase high-effort replies:

research has found that simply seeing faces, even briefly, activates the part of our brain that recognizes friends, priming us to be more social and engaged.

seeing familiar faces within proximity of content in the feed of friends provides a powerful social motivation, incentivizing people to interact.

when users see their friends have interacted with a post, they perceive the content as more valuable and are more motivated to engage with intent.

once users are primed and motivated to engage, the interface should adapt and nudge the action. in this case, it could be as simple as presenting the input directly within the content (eliminating the extra click).

a study from NIH found that users were significantly more likely to provide a well-formed, substantive response to an open-ended question when presented with a prominent text input.

in short, pairing familiar faces (social proof) and prominent inputs can potentially improve users' motivation to engage with high-effort replies.