Unfortunately, the growth here comes not gradually but momentary. And the bots did not go anywhere. If you are in the list of auto-voting of one of the whales, then you're done. This can happen in 10 posts or 1,000 posts... but this does not negate the fact that you still need to continue to write good content. Last winter, in the dark days of Steemit, I was getting good results for each post (about 200 steem (not SBD) for each post), but then left the platform due to circumstances for a few months, and still can't reach past results.

So keep up the work, if you want to achieve results, and after that continue with your work, if you are serious.