I can’t express enough how important it is not to put expectations on the amount of support you may receive on a post.

It's sad that so many people compare their post rewards to trending instead of geez I don't know, what they would get anywhere else? It's not complaints and questions of why posts aren't getting higher rewards that'll get them higher rewards, it's the posts, authors trying their best to bring more value to Hive by sharing their posts, bringing in traffic, connecting with other authors to drive engagement to their posts that'll naturally get them more rewards over time. The simplicity of Hive often drives people to not even understand how the economy here works, for every 100 Hive they sell there's an investor or other author/stakeholder buying that 100 Hive in hopes that it'll be worth more in the future, that's not going to happen by just posting, doing nothing to provide more value to Hive in any other ways you can and quickly go work on a new post while trying to maximize the amount you can sell through unsolicited dm's or comments on curators' posts asking why they not getting more. Authors already have the insanely great benefit of starting from scratch, having their immutable space and blogging site already set up for them and having curators actively trying to find and reward you yet they quickly become spoiled and feel they deserve more.

Oh well, over time the people truly valuing what they're earning and holding are going to do a lot better than those just looking for short term fiat gains who more often than not act absurdly weird to downvotes and aim for the door at the first hurdle of their maximization attempts. The next hardfork will be interesting and I hope those truly doing the best they can with most activity mentioned above and placing a lot more efforts into their posts can see a lot more votestacking of bigger accounts as curation returns aren't disincentivized that way.