I agree, it's really important for humanity to start getting a blockchain social media right, it's even getting critical now.
I only recently joined, composed 2 posts that were not looked at by anybody, felt like a waste of energy. Wondering what i'm doing wrong and thinking about tipping a bot - how else will people even start to notice the contribution?
You have failed to realize that screaming into a void gains no attention. I've been here almost a year now, and for the most part 3/4 of my rewards come from comments, rather than my posts. I do post, but engaging in discussions is the actual point of social media, not content creation.
It isn't the quality of posts that most matters, but the quality of engagement. Making a post is akin to starting a conversation. Commenting is joining in. Usually the conversations I join are more profound than those I start ;)
Until you have a large following spending a lot of effort making posts isn't going to generate substantial financial rewards. Jumping on the bots doesn't produce useful engagement, and thus isn't much point, at least to me. I've never bothered, because I'm not here to make money, but to escape censorship and propaganda infesting other platforms.
If your only purpose here is to gain financial rewards, go mine some crypto instead of mining the rewards pool here intended to reward creators and incentivize Steemit society. Your question indicates otherwise, despite interest in rewards.
Seek out content that aligns with your interests and comment cogently when you have insight to offer, and you will grow a community that is interested in what you have to say. Then your posts will be seen by your followers, rather than no one. Except for appearing in new, which is chaos, only your followers see your posts in their feed--unless you pay for botvotes, which doesn't get you any attention from me, cuz I'd rather wander aimlessly through new than be annoyed by the panderers in trending.
Build an audience through participating in the community of interest and you will post to that audience. You haven't done that yet. You are now, by commenting here.
The words of wise man once said the above speech. I agree with all your advice. What is curious is that I make more money off photos. The money from comments and posts is on average the same!