It can be extremely confusing. I sometimes find myself looking at my old articles and thinking "What the hell was I doing back then that got me so many rewards, and why can't I do it now?"

The truth is that my content nowadays is a lot better than what I was creating last year, and the rewards I got were sometimes my own merit, while other times, pure luck.

It's frustrating, and knowing other people have to deal with that makes me less worried. I guess we shouldn't be that surprised that old pieces of content get attention from time to time, sometimes more than our recent works. After all, what we publish doesn't go away with time, and people can revisit (or stumble upon) old content to see more of what we do.

But I guess that looking back isn't always good. Progress is not made by constantly thinking about the past. Progress is made by looking forwards, learning from mistakes and working.

Thank you for reading and commenting :)

Thank you! :)

Yes, luck is a really important factor (sometimes, it's scary how important luck can be), and we should more often take it into consideration when doing something. There are days when we get rewarded just out of luck, and days when we receive nothing, because we're unlucky. It's not always our fault or merit that we get what we get in life. It's scary, but it's something more people should remember in my opinion.

Thank you for reading! :)

It can be a bit disheartening indeed, but it can also be confusing, making you doubt your best articles and turn towards more mediocre content in an attempt to please the people who upvoted that type of content in the past.

It's hard to wrap your mind around it, but, as you said, it's important to focus on our best work and improve based on that.

Thanks for reading :)

I know about those people, and sadly, that's just how things are.

Some of them use bots, some of them just ask others for upvotes, while others receive a lot of rewards for the simple fact that they have a lot of SP, and people upvote their articles hoping to get something in return as well, which usually doesn't happen.

It's how it is, and there's nothing we can do about it. Those who have a lot of money will almost always make more.

Focusing on getting better at writing is what ultimately matters. If this system stops working for those people, you'll at least have the skills needed to write great content, and that's what people will be interested in.

If Steemit goes down completely in the future, using another platform and knowing how to write well enough to get some attention fairly fast is also gonna be useful, especially if the systems that work here for some people won't work on those other platforms.

Mastering a skills is a lot better in the long run than making a quick buck now.

Thank you for reading and also for the nice words! :)

Good point!

I didn't think about it before, but it may just be that sometimes, while luck does play a role, people just enjoy a certain article more than some new content you created that is, from a technical point of view, better than what you published before.

I guess everyone sees quality in their own way. For the writer the word "quality" may mean something, while for the reader, it may mean something completely different.

So it does make sense that while self analyzing your progress, you can sometimes be mistaken and look at some old piece of content that got a bunch of rewards, and associate that with luck, rather than people liking it because of a specific thing you did or a specific style you used to write that article.

With that being said, maybe improving our way of self analysis and trying to judge our work using different methods and looking at it from different angles can help us understand better why a particular piece of content got more attention than something else, and not think about luck immediately.

Thank you for reading and for leaving this comment, you gave me something to think about :)

Thanks :)