What is the purpose of posting anything? If it's egocentric, i.e. to get maximum attention for yourself and your account, then go ahead and post what's trendy right now and you will get lots of likes - pictures of cats or doge for instance. And then you measure "success" of a post just by the numbers of upvotes. This will recirculate what is already there but creates nothing inherently new.
If the purpose is to create value for someone else, then in the extreme case if one person reads this (and not even upvotes) might change that person's life completely for the better. That is true success to me. By this measurement, upvotes are only a proxy for real impact on someone's life, and not even a good proxy - comments are better.
Another purpose might be to brainstorm together on complex topics, then people often post lots of comments, like this one, with no pictures. Does it mean comments wihtout pics have no value?