I've noticed something interesting, after not posting for six months - I always get the same response to my posts, regardless of the quality of the content. I decided to test my theory.
Today, I've spent a couple of hours, editing good quality photos, taken with my DSLR, and then published this lovely photo story:
DEK Photography: The High ISO Black & White Trip
I've watched other posts, posted in the same time frame, with inferior content (both images and text) get more likes and ten to a hundred times more profit. At the time of this post, I have 8 likes and $0.32.
Then, a couple of hours later, as I was walking down the street, I took a photo with my phone. It was not edited in Lightroom, it was not taken with a high quality camera and only had a single sentence to accompany the image.
Again, I've watched other posts, posted in the same time frame. Since this was a lower quality image with less text, it provided for an even better comparison to other, more successful posts, published at the same time. Again, there were other posts, which received much more likes and ten to a hundred times more profit. At the time of publishing this post, this single low quality photo with a line of text has received 12 likes and $0.47, which is more than the my previous publication which took a couple of hours to edit and publish.
So, apparently publication time was not a factor, as other people posted successful content of better, similar or inferior quality, at the same times as I did. So I decided to check out my followers.
Most of them have left Steemit and have not published in months. So, conclusion number one:
People are mostly unsuccessful on Steemit and eventually abandon it.
Conclusion number two:
This creates a high turnover, meaning that if you stop posting, you will soon run out of active followers, despite the follower counter showing hundreds of followers.
But then I thought to myself: "Wait a minute. I don't need followers per se, all new content is visible by everyone, especially when it's initially posted. So what else is wrong?"
Conclusion number three:
Minnows don't vote on content (they may not even open the post), but actually vote on content by a specific user. In other words, if a user consistently gets high profits on his posts, minnows will vote on his every new post, regardless of the quality of the content, hoping to get more Steem as curators.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, destroys the idea of creating, posting and rewarding unique and high quality content on Steemit.