Is it More Important to be a Good Writer or to be Poplular on Steemit? Are They Synonymous?

Golden greetings and silver salutations! I would like to think out loud today...or think quietly while writing. So brace yourself for some of my random musings.

First off, I love Steemit. I used to enjoy writing, but I stopped. I always assumed that no one wanted to read my writing, then along comes this little platform. Now I am writing again and it is becoming lucrative. I was a journalism major in college for a bit, and now a little bit of me feels like a professional writer and that I succeeded in that field.

Side note, if you wonder why I changed majors, writing is fun on your own time. Being forced to write numerous long stories and articles that you do not care about can drain your love for writing. I was on the newspaper staff and between that and homework, I was writing, editing, and researching countless hours.

Ok, sorry for the tangent, I am back on track now. I was reading a post from someone I follow and because it was enjoyable, I upvoted it. Then I noticed something peculiar:

This post was worth $40, was 40+ minutes old, and had only one view (which I assume was me). I thought that this individual may have been a whale or bought some votes. Nope, their account was comparable to mine and there was no delegation. I looked at the votes and 2 of them were worth over $15. I thought, wow, no matter the level of the quality of the post, each and every one of their recent posts was worth over $30. I have never had a post worth $30, and they could post a gif and receive over $30.

So this is where my subject line comes into play. Is it more important to be a good writer or popular? Does being a good writer lead to popularity? I feel sometimes that it is more important to be in organizations and active on Discord than it is to churn out quality content. I am a member of two great organizations, #steemsilvergold and #thealliance. I do not fault their existence and love that they offer additional engagement with a community.

Though if you want to monetarily succeed on this platform, you only need one thing... to be on people's curation / voting trails. These organizations allow you to meet people, and if you like them enough, you may put them on your trail. The screenshot I showed above is not an uncommon thing to encounter. Look at the recent high profile voting war that just went on in Steemit. Wars like this are terrible for the platform as a whole and I feel would deter new users. In a perfect world, I think we should not allow auto upvoting and let manual voting determine the best content. But this Steemit world is new and exciting and imperfect as hell.

Now am I a hypocrite? Absolutely! Seriously, I would love to be on your voter trail, even though I question their purpose. I understand that we want to support our friends. For example, I want every single person in the #steemsilvergold community to make lots of money on their posts, so they can buy more coins, so they can write more posts about them (and repeat ad infinitum).

As for me, I accept that my posts are of varying quality. Yet anytime I write I will have a baseline of what my post will be worth, about $3. Then some random upvotes will usually take me to the $5 range. Seriously, why is some crap that I wrote in twenty minutes worthy of being worth anything? Also, a part of me feels that it is unfair to myself and the community, that the ones I spent hours on, and am proud to have written, are worth just as much as my other quick posts.

I am done rambling...except for one thing that I purposely saved for last. Does anyone ever read the entire post? I tend to leave questions for the reader at the end of my posts. I have seen many other writers do likewise, yet they are rarely answered, even by those that take the time to write a comment. Do you find this to be the case? I'll know if you read this full post, based on your comment : )

Ok, rambling officially done. It is time for lunch. I want to write another post later. It won't take nearly as long to write (I have removed, replaced, and reworded the crap out of this post), but it will be worth the same! Feel free to prove me wrong. Oh, and please do not think I am bitter...I really do LOVE Steemit!

TL:DR I said a lot of rambling stuff. It would just be easier to add me to your curation / voter trail and you may just want to throw me a resteem for good measure.