It feels as if there is no audience here, only voters trying to make a buck**.
For example, if you go to steemstem, one of the communities I'm part of, there are posts by well-known Steemians writing about the details of cosmology and string theory. These posts receive 200-300 upvotes within 20 minutes. I have significant physics training, and I don't understand the article. Do you think that 300 people read and understood this article within 20 minutes. There are literally 100s of users that blindly upvote $uccessful authors because they think they can make money from curation.
Then I post... ...it feels like giving a talk to a mostly empty convention hall. (Yes, I've done this in real life so I do know what it feels like.) I think I have 3-5 real readers, and I appreciate them, but otherwise my upvotes are people simply tossing a coin in at 27 minutes to see if they can profit.
What's more, my posts that are over 24 hours old never have upvotes -- or views as far as I can tell -- so what is the good for keeping these around? Why not simply discard all content after it is 7 days old? Very few people read these old posts -- there is no incentive.
My, and other's, frustrations isn't about the money, but the futility of talking to an empty room. Maybe there are people there, but upvotes, which are basically free to give as a sign of "Hey, I saw your post. Kind of neat!" are not forthcoming. I'd be content with a zero-valued thumbs up vote, that simply acknowledged that someone was watching. Upvotes on "expired" posts would be great too, even if there is no payout, it demonstrates that there is an audience.
As I mentioned in my "VLog #001," there is a Harvard Business Review article, from around 2014 or so, that claims that the root of happiness is feeling that one has an impact on the world. I came here because I thought the model of paying people to read and view my posts would give me a bigger audience, but it seems almost to have done the opposite. (OK, so when you start very near zero you can't really go lower, but you get the idea...)
To be clear, I am not leaving Steemit anytime soon, but I'm watching to see how it evolves. Presently, I'm planning to use Steemit and DTube to host my content, and then create an external website that links to it. I want to attract external viewers, since I don't think there are many internal ones.
(**Admittedly, I have authors that I autovote too, but on top of this, I am reading and voting manually on a daily basis.)
Sorry for the late reaponse!
I have read your comment in the day you posted and I couldn't agree more... I guess that in this world and on this platform as well, it is the money that matter. So, unfortunately, in order to be successful and to gain audience here, at this time at least, you have to either be very good at what you write about and have a huge perseverance or to have a big amount of money and be willing to share.
Maybe in future things will change, but the current situation here is because some users are into making money, so they will try to produce content while they are not interested in reading anything. This saturates the small audience here with content and does not let you to reach many people with the articles that you write. This simply makes the report between (content producers / content consumers) too big.
As I have said, maybe with the onboarding of new users, things will change, but for the moment, this is the situation that we have to face and maybe the money are not encouraging healthy interaction, but more like fake people commenting on the posts of different whales, while others are continuously pushing garbage content into the blockchain...