Yeah, I have been busting my ass for about a year and all I have earned 5 real followers who would come and read my post...
I don't mind upvotes but I love especially when someone puts a decent comment under my post, even a sarcastic one, it really makes me feel honored.
I admit, I sell votes but to a certain extent. To avoid the loss, when I am away from steemit. I use smartsteem to vote for whitelisted users only...Thereby making sure that my sold vote goes to some one awesome(whitelisted users usually make genuine contents).
And my dream of getting a whale attention remained a dream...Even best of my posts never got the deserving attention...
This situation implies to me, that there is no use of putting your sweet in those long post, as there is no appreciation.
PS
I did an analysis of trending page 3 months ago...
Paid/Bid Bots Ruling The Trending Page: The Message It Sends
I get some automated vote which I am grateful for, but comments make it worth while. Luckily the spam is still pretty low for now. I get some great comments. You just have to keep engaging like this and find your audience. I've put in a lot of work to get this far.
Yeah comments make it all worth...please have a look at my 3 months old post...almost 90% payouts on trending page were paid/bid or self vote ones.
I gave up on Trending. It's useless to me. I do sometimes flag some of them, but I can't make much difference.
Yeah trending is same as hot and promoted section...nobody cares for it...its been a week since I last looked at trending...because I know, its going to be the same old story.
Anyways thanks for sparing time to read my comments and replying...means a lot to me.