When I first started looking into crypto I saw the steem token on coinmarketcap and checked out the website. I ignored if for a few months then decided to give it a try. I was quite late to join and had a similar early experience in the begining that you had. I made a few well thought out posts at the start about philosophy and such and got a few votes that were not really worth anything. I remember feeling really annoyed that a post that I spent hours on received about $0.05 cents while a comment on the same post stating "this is great" recieved $1.40. That made zero sense to me at the time as a new user. I then made a lot of half assed posts for a few weeks and they went nowhere. One night I changed it up a bit and made a post on lucid dreaming techniques, something I was very interested in at the time. I added in a bunch of images and titles and headings and formatted the post nicely. I was shocked the next morning to see that the post was worth $80.00 and that it made it to the main trending page on steemit. From then on I only focused on long form well formatted posts and continued to recieve around $45 per article. Eventually I joined @sndbox which helped me grow significantly. Once that ended though things became very challenging again. The same strategies that used to work no longer did. Now I mainly just write for fun about topics I really enjoy. I spend most of my time on steem commenting on others posts, trying to build relationships and supporting others who support me. It's been a fun journey overall. I regret nothing.
Sorry, that's probably longer then you cared to hear but that's my steemit story :)
Posted using Partiko Android