Thank you for mentioning me and my articles. I got pulled into all this stuff because of the fiction situation. Worrying whether my serial will get flagged made it pretty personal. But I think you have a good point with comments and @transisto has a good point about views, although I wish the views reading went into the blockchain and weren't dependent on what front-end you use. If people aren't looking at your stuff, how can if have any value, even if some are upvoting it? I wish people would quit upvoting things that they don't bother to look at. As I write this, your post shows 43 votes and 40 views. So unless some of the voters used other front ends, you have more votes than views right now. I am sure that will change quickly, as your post is only 6 hours old.

As for contests, I write fiction. And I must admit that I've seen top quality stories come out of a lot of contests lately. It helps that I'm part of a writing community where we spread the word about "good" contests, help each other brainstorm and edit, and happily root for the opposition when it's time for judging. IF you want to see quality come out of competitions, take a look at the recent #hardforkseries competition. The SFT is still deciding which of those stories are worth of curation and has already curated 5 of them, if I remember correctly. I also recommend looking at pretty much all of @gmuxx's Art Prompt Writing Contests. He routinely attracts top quality entries.

Like you, I enjoy the color challenges. However I am rethinking my urge to post for every day. I've decided to post for the days I have time and really have a quality photo--one that really is worth looking at on its own--as opposed to just trying to find something that fits the day's colors.

I am trying to watch the views and interactions on my posts and let some of that influence what I choose to post in the future. This spike in SBD has me worried--worried that people will be making trash posts, just to get some SBD in a week to hope they catch the spike.

Slogging through the new fiction and story tags for my curation work is really a nightmare. There is so much spam and trash and gibberish that it is really difficult to find stuff worth curating. That makes me think about how it must be for a reader from outside. How will we get those readers, if they have to slog through tons and tons of garbage to find a few gems?