I have noticed a pattern. This pattern is subjected to my own anecdotal observations. Nevertheless, I think it may be important. Many popular posts have been getting shorter and shorter. This may evolve to the point that the most successful authors have a few posts per day that are obviously more involved than a tweet but not as detailed as a lengthy blog post.
Many users have experienced the problem of doing research for many hours and even days, only to post a blog on steem that earns $0.03. If you don’t get enough upvotes in the first hour or so, then most likely your content gets buried under the mass of new posts coming online. Popularity will most likely come with the exposure of posting new content over time and gaining more followers as a result.
I see steem posting as evolving along the path of being a natural extention to a person’s career. In other words, a knowledgeable medical professional may post the occasional short piece about her take on new medical technology or her take on best practices developed in the medical industry. This person may receive a few dollars for each post. This may take months or even years to evolve, especially since I believe the initial launch of steem resulted in stake centralization issues.
I have personally shortened my posts with better success. The main reason I post is to help formulate my thoughts on the crypto industry, crypto markets and markets in general. Making some money is just icing on the cake.
In my opinion an ideal post is short and sweet and to the point with some graphics to help visually understand the content. Steemers may want to focus on these short and direct posts and focus on more posts spread out over time. Comments generally go unrewarded, at least not rewarded to the extent that parent posts are rewarded. This too may evolve to the point where a parent post is nearly indistinguishable from a comment post. Its such early days with this technology that there is no certainty on how this will evolve, but this is just one path.
Disclaimer: This is not advice of any kind.