Yeah it is hard to wrap your head around what content gets good payouts. Steemit is a weird place in a lot of ways but look at something like YouTube. I practically had several depression episodes on YouTube that would get a couple thousand views and then I would see someone put a video up of their dog chewing a sock and it would get hundreds of thousands of views. I used to really beat myself up over it. It was very frustrating.
The reason it is hiding it is because of the guys Steem Power. He had more power and it took the post basically to $0 so it hid it. I will upvote one of the posts and you will see it light back up.
I get what you are saying about testing for sure. Sometimes what gets a good payout doesn't make any sense. It can be very frustrating for sure. The thing we have to do is build up as much Steem Power as fast as possible so that it doesn't matter anymore because we can always pay ourselves. Right now with the trail of bots that hit my account I get paid $10 automatically. It is a good feeling. I know the feeling of not knowing if you are even going to make $0.50 for a post. It really sucks. Now that we can get actual voting power in the system the holly grail will be to get to where you could pay yourself beyond your minimum thresh hold you feel is worth it. Let's say if that is $10 or $20 or whatever. I'm just going to keep going crazy until I'm paying myself $1000 / post like it isn't anything! Hahahah, Price of Steem would have to MOON but that is very possible. We have to get it right now while it is hot!!!
And I can tell you this man. No matter if the price goes down a lot or things don't seem great on here. ...... I'm telling you this. Steemit will survive. What we went through in the last year on here was hell. It made the Adpocolypse look like a day at the beach. After I saw it survive from that and all the fighting that was going on I'm confident that it will survive 100%.
Something I'm starting to kind of realize is that Steemit isn't Youtube. That's not to say it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's just what it is.
I agree Youtube is wierd in what gets big and what doesn't but I think at the end of the day good content will get shared, will get upvoted, will get interacted with and will rise to the top. On Steemit I feel like a lot of great content gets lost in the shuffle and while I'm not super powerful on here something I want to do more of is resteeming and trying to get good content that attention.
I think Steemit is more about the interaction and building up a community more so than its about creating content, at least for now.
I dont remember who I was chatting with on Steemit but someone had said they stopped creating content and are spending all their time on commenting. WHile I'm not going to go to that extreme I think they're onto something.
In terms of accumulating Steem, I see its pretty cheap right now. Say I wanted to load up adn drop like 2 btc into steem, would that have a significant affect on my account or not really?
I did the math and if the Situation with ChainBB can continue with the small upvote on comment. Even if it is only $0.07 from @jesta I thought in my head. You can comment every 20 seconds. So let's just be conservative and say that you could comment every 30 seconds. That would be 120 comments / hour at $0.07 let's just say even though it is usually more. So that is $8.4 / hour and let's say a person just goes animal all day for like 12 hours. Well that is $100.80 / day worth of Steem Power. That is actually pretty amazing. A person would probably get carpal tunnel but still. People get that at their jobs. LOL. So what I'm trying to do is do a combination of comments, bot driven activity and my posts to really amp it up. Plus my plan with my bot arms is not only will I be getting the upvotes from Jesta and a couple other auto votes then I pile my bot army on and it looks like I said something super insightful when there are 20 upvotes. Hahahah That could suck in some more votes. But I don't know...... I will have to get this figured out more.
If you power up 2 BTC worth I feel like your upvote will be worth a solid $3 or $4. At that point just on the posts you have been doing you will be able to pump up your earnings quite a bit. Plus earning some interest on the Steem Power. But even with power depleted if you vote was worth $1 each time you could really create a better base earnings each day.
Plus another thing is that I have noticed that the more Steem Power someone has the more people gravitate to them. I think their are many reasons for this but I feel like a lot of people try to suck up to the person to try to get their upvote when they are more powerful. I feel like if I had 20,000 Steem Power I would have well over 2000 followers. So suddenly your following could increase and more people will be commenting and checking in on your stuff the more power you have. People notice real quick and to be honest when you swim in and give a dolphin a solid upvote real quick they will notice that your vote is worth something and check out your wallet. Trust me..... All the time after I post if I see the earnings jump I looked at who voted and then if I don't know them I will click on their account and check out their wallet to see how much steem power they have and then go to Steemd to see what percentage they upvoted me with .