Trending? I tried.... Tried my best!
Nowhere near the top on Trending, but within the art category this managed to hit the top 20 trending. A small victory. Some of the posts above it were using the art tag loosely, as in, those posts weren't 100% about art. If we exclude those, technically this post was a little higher up than how it appeared in the list.
$80 isn't too shabby at all. The main trending page when I wrote this consisted of a couple really good individual efforts(which looks good for Steemit because they're trying to attract normal, everyday, people). Then we had some scammer milking the rewards pool. About 5 of his posts with obsolete trading "tips" cluttered up the place along with an army of idiots writing testimonial like comments under each post. Then we had a large whale who wasn't pleased with these scammers getting a few things off his chest. And finally two accounts. One starts with 'ads' and the other starts with the letter v. Those two, no matter what is actually inside the post, will earn far beyond what even this post earned before people even open it to see what's inside. Bots just auto vote it to the top whether it's good or not. Technically, that's a scam too. It scams Steemit out of being able to keep users feeling like they too could reach those levels. The popular Dtube videos are automatically upvoted by dtube to promote dtube. If a member here uses that service and earns $500, $250 is going to curators and Dtube instead of the content producer. There's so much more than meets the eye. For some reason, I think many of those earning the most with consistent auto votes think the rest of us are blind and/or stupid.
I just wanted to put some art there. Just wanted to show Steemit that it's still possible even though most anyone else on that lists looks for a trick or a way to game to system to be there. I nearly did it. Sorry about this ramble. I haven't had my coffee yet.
No worries. We all need a good ramble sometimes.
Thanks and good luck next time!!