Same here. I do have a lot of really cool and smart people who follow me, and I appreciate their comments and upvotes. And my content is probably not the absolute best, but I spend way too much time doing research and trying to educate people on cryptos (within MY limitation of course..im not perfect or genius or anything)
But with my own upvote accounting for more than 50% of the profit and I make usually 1-1,5$ per post the incentive to keep making (semi) quality posts (at least better than average) is just very low right now. Why spend 2 hours creating something unique when you're not getting paid anything..and you could make a shitpost and perhaps even make MORE. I mean..I could make more just making a shitty meme in Canva than I would writing a long article or do a TA or a market update. Why bother? personally I've been trying hard for 6 months now. Gaining a lot of followers and always rewarded good comments etc. But I don't seem to attract any whales or anyone who wants to support me with more profitable upvotes. (Again..very appreciative for the upvotes I do get)
This is not complaining. If my content is not good enough, its best to improve or try other things. There will be other platforms and/or other ways to earn an income.
The ironic thing is however that the more I've improved on this platform - the more I've connected with people..the LESS i earn. I earned the most in the beginning..now..well, hardly anything. Even when I use boosters I don't earn anything..I thought the whole idea was that a post with lets say 30-40$ in it before 30 minutes in the hot section would attract some upvotes..no..not even that is working. It's like my content smells like shit or something :D
I'll just keep improving..or leave. We'll see what happens. All I know is that its frustrating to see shit content getting rewarded and good content not getting rewarded. And it's not only with me it seems.
We have to try and help each other out. I try as good as I can to auto upvote people who I know make good content regularly. And I do also read through posts and reward content that I think is great more randomly.
I'm not sure what else to do?
Well, dude. It's not really about the content. Maybe at the very beginning of this thing, the content mattered some, but now in 2018, what is posted is absolutely meaningless. It's about who posts it. This thing runs on relationships.
I'm not even saying that it's somehow wrong, or anything. It's just an observation of a fact. And to be fair, the real world isn't any different. I've gotten promotions and whatnot just based on the fact that the people above me liked me as a person. Sure, I worked hard, but Id'd say joking around with the right people and giving them a positive impression of me helped a lot more.
Post if you like posting. If you're here to make money, I'd say it's pretty pointless to be here. You can try to network, get delegation, suck up to the right people, etc. to get the bigger votes, but any attempt to "improve your content" in hopes of the big upvotes is a wasted effort.
You're not in the club, which means that the large stakeolders will never click on your posts, let alone read them, let alone upvote them. Upvotes are either bought, or they're given out in a vote for vote fashion. If you don't have the sufficient SP to give out big votes to those giving out big votes, they won't benefit from you, and you'll get skipped.
That's not even taking into account the fact that you post controversial stuff about politics, and that sort of stuff is frowned upon here, as well. It's a political game. No one wants to touch risque material like immigration, racism, etc. because that may place them in a negative light, and it might cost them their own whale support. It's better, then, to just stay away from that.
Like I said, post if you enjoy posting, but adjust your expectations. It's stake based voting platform, and there was never another way for things to turn out; Steemit is not about the content, it's about people printing themselves free money.
And again, I'm not even saying that it's a "bad thing", per se, it's just a free market, and they always work on nepotism. It's natural and it is what it is.
It's pointless to look at someone's TA or meme shitposts and think: "Oh, I should just do that" because the posts are just a smokescreen. The people "on top" could be posting blank posts with nothing in them and make the exact same amount of money.
People don't upvote posts, they upvote users.
Thanks man. Ive been a little naive. This was a great comment.