Life has taught me that what happens around you is influenced to a large degree by random stuff you can't control, so in some regard it's built as an unfair experience. You can have everything given to you with little effort or everything taken away from you by a series of unfortunate events. I find the lesson that things can appear a bit unfair to be very valuable on Hive as well.
While there are a lot of people that say your posts should be 5 km long and contain 3 billion pictures, if you strive to put in the effort to reach those lofty goals you might be surprised to see that upvotes won't coming piling in like flies on poo. And to make things even more demoralizing you might stumble on posts containing a single images with the price of Hive and the text being a very very round about way of saying Hive is the best with sunshine and double rainbows on top. Basically throw some words around and get some upvotes seems to be some people's strategy and the thing is - at least in some cases -it's working. Not being critical of their "work" or anything, I'm just telling it how I see it. Humans like to make the least amount of work for the maximum amount of bang, so I can appreciate that some people are optimizing their hustle.
Don't want to give off the wrong vibes here, I appreciate every cent of magic internet money I can get, and Hive is the greatest place where you can currently earn crypto, like I've said in the past. However I don't shy away from more controversial topics like trying to get to grips with discrepancies regarding post quality and upvotes. That sort of thing can be difficult especially for newbies and I hope some of them will stumble on this post and they'll have a few lols while also learning something useful.
I think it's important to find the sweet spot between putting in too much effort and being frustrated about it not being rewarded accordingly in your eyes, and putting out obvious crap that will trigger all sorts of nasty reactions like downvotes and stuff. Getting burned out for pennies and then giving up on Hive I think is detrimental for user retention on the blockchain, that's why I like to treat my activity here as very long marathon.
I reserve the term "shitpost" for posts that look a bit dodgy but are intended to be as funny and entertaining as possible with the general tone being very tongue-in-cheek. But it's an uphill battle trying to get people to stop using it for actual very low effort stuff.
The bottom line is that it isn't easy getting to the point where you're earning a lot of magic internet money on Hive, or at least I haven't found a quick way to get there. So pacing your effort on this very long journey is almost as important as showing up regularly to post and make silly jokes in the comment section.
A few words about the Goodenough island: I found out about it while watching a WW2 documentary on youtube. It's an actual island near Papua New Guinea and it was named after a naval dude with the same surname. I guess there were not a lot of over achievers in that family because you could always say it's "good enough" :)
