First I'm gonna rant about it.

1. On a daily basis, I don't stop creating content.
2. I spend time on my post doing research. Will be easier when I do some writing about my opinion, but whales doesn't like it
3. I do filter my photos. What can be post, and what can't be.
4. I spend time mingle with others so I get their attention
5. I repeat the above consistently and hoping to gain more traction

And what do I get?

1. Complement from a few friends that really read my work, but hardly any real conversation
2. A bunch of trail upvotes that hardly made up some serious value
3. A bunch of votes that is so obvious that the amount of people who viewed my post is less than 10% most of the time, because they're trail
4. Upvote value that is so low that if divide the value by number of votes, it's hardly more than 1¢ per voter
5. Consider lucky if I get anything more than 3$. That also being upvoted by my local community support.

Ugly truth

Let's face the truth. There's very little to no real readers here. Curation trail has their individual/specified working order, one gotta follow their rules and regulations. If you fail to comply, you don't get upvote from them. There's time that I made a post, waiting for upvote with full excitement. After an hour, there's about a dollar worth came in. And I will be expecting the same momentum continue for the next few days, not bad right! After 3 days my post would be atleast 72$. Sadly, it doesn't happen that way. Whatever happened to the voting list, it happens only within the first hour. There's a group of people who will vote you between 15 - 30 minutes. They know your potential of getting bigger payout later so they can earn a better curation reward. Some real readers will still upvote you by 30 minutes, and that too because they wanna take back their 25% curation reward. Technically, after the 1 hour period, chances of getting a real big upvote from your supporter become slimmer than your hair!

Things I learn to survive

So what the fish am I still doing here? Here's the thing I learned so far, and I'm HODLing them to my dearly blogging life.

1. No one has ever promised to upvote me. Previously I have done my study when I reached 400 followers. Like less than 10% are reading my post. I need to get real and start to make real friends!
2. No one has ever promised to give full upvotes to curation trail, or their voting power will drain in less than 5 minutes. I need to accept the fact people vote with 0.01% despite they have only 5sp, simply because they wanna support the trail, not me!
3. When there's curation trail upvote, the number of voters will come in huge. I can't force them all to give me big upvotes, but atleast the curator is reading my post. So what if I only got 1 organic view and bunch of ghost votes? I need to get over it!
4. As soon as I press the freaking POST button, immediately my post got pushed down and dropped off the screen. I can probably still find my post somewhere at the bottom of the south China sea. No one is obliged to dig up my post from there if I can't find it by myself!
5. What's so attractive about my posts? Was it the picture? Was it the title? I recon none of them. The least a chick post her selfie worth clicking than my Fat ass cheek. I asked myself, will I click on a chick photo or myself? The answer is final, anytime I would click on that chick rather than myself! Trust me I'm not a sexist, but I do click on hot chicks photos, and numerous time I almost got phished. Reason that I'm still surviving is because I always misplaced my keys, that got me some time to think about what have I clicked.

Ugly truth isn't it? These all boil down to manage expectation. What I did was seeing other people success and hoping that with my skill, I will be able to replicate the same result as them. Have I ever thought of how many of those successful people are actually circle jerking? Have I ever thought of they spent hundreds of SBD buying votes from upvote bots and ended up harming everyone who bid for the same round of vote? And why the fish am I still blogging? Probably less then 2 will read until here, but let's put my real thought at the bottom of the ocean and see how many replies I get, probably some bots will come and ask me to follow, but I'm not going to give a damn anyway. I'm starting to realize, there's only so much skill I have in creating quality content. I don't need to race against anyone. I don't need to have any one to promise me anything. Last but not least, I need to thank my friends whose continue to upvote me and leave me real comments to help me improve. All I gotta do is continue steeming the hell out of my brain juice. Have fun singing karaoke and make people suffer from listening to my crap voice and see how people react. I'm gonna continue to keep my workout journal going on. One day, hopefully steem still exist, I will be reading back all these and take it as my personal diary. Money making is the motivation of keeping people to continue writing. Having writing as a passion is a total new territory to me, but I start to feel a pinch of sweetness in it.

Now bugger off. Start to create your own content or roll over and leave steemit.