This is a tough platform for sure, and I am sure your own feelings are repeated 100's of time throughout accounts on here. It's frustrating for me to keep finding what are excellent quality posts, informative, interesting, loads of pictures and writing - still getting very little.

I know you comment a great deal - mainly because I find quite often you have been to posts and commented before I have. It helps for sure to get yourself about, commenting works but quite often I think the social side of discord helps get your name around and make sure people remember you. But of course it's who you know as well, because you can have more then 100 upvotes and still get very little - or one big vote from a whale if you can find a friendly one.

And of course the discouragement is you look around and see people getting 100's of dollar reward posts, but honestly everyone getting what seems like big rewards for posts is doing the exact same thing I do on every single one of my posts - bid bot the hell out of them. I've done it since the Bid Bot's came out, and in reality that was how my $0.2 posts started turning to $2, and then every time I got rewards they got fed back into posts using everything I gained back into the bid bot's and slowly it all built up. In fact a few weeks back I feel asleep after creating a post without hitting a single bot on it, woke up and it had reached $4 - I was amazed, I couldn't believe I really had so many people who would upvote my mediocre content. Then I bid bot the hell out of it lol.

The other thing about this hobby of mine is it's REALLY expensive, and I go Snowboarding! But between all the bid botting and paying out for Steem Power delegations to increase my upvote - I have to keep buying extra Steem to fund my decadence. It's costing me 8 Steem a week per 1000 Steem Power delegation to increase my upvote a bit, they go up and down as I keep forgetting to renew them and it's a right pain to get a new lease when you drop one. Of course my own Steem Power has value, and if I cashed it all out I would effectively have made something out of this even after what I have bought in - although knowing my luck the value will drop out before I ever think of trying to cash out!

You have put a great deal of effort in, and sometimes it is ups and downs especially as everything post reward follows the value of Steem - it would be a shame to give up on what you have already worked hard to build. I know I was a little late putting in my #HappyPlace post but it seems to have been a really inspiring tag and I think you will see it grow more and more if you keep at it - because it doesn't have to be a one use tag - holidays, days out - a #HappyPlace could be many places and promote so many posts.

You should of course only do what you feel is right for you, but I personally think it would be a big shame if you gave up and left - and certainly I would miss your posts - I might not see every one but I'm trying to read alot of posts - and then when sometimes my comments can take 30 to 40 minutes to do as well - it's a hard juggle!

#thealliance