my whale friends vote on my posts despite its quality I can cash in a few hundreds per day

Ah. We have the reverse "problem", you and I. Instead of having to create content good enough to attract attention, we invest in making good posts to justify our whale's support and still be able to look at ourselves in the mirror. I totally get it.

I accidentally ran a little experiment. SteemVoter was down, and so was steempty's trail on me. I ran a failed livestream of a Hearthstone game and it was so bad (by my standards) that I didn't even self upvote it. It payed out a couple of days ago.

My results: $60 in payout. $27 out of that was a whale who sometimes upvotes my things manually and I honestly wish it was someone I knew and could speak to, maybe teach him how to set up a trail so he can "use" my curation abilities like steempty does, to earn curation rewards by trailing me.

Second biggest vote is the interesting one. - + dlive 3% ≈ 23.82$. That's not a whale friend, and an upvote ANYONE running a dlive can get. So without my friend whales and with one random whale, I got $60 on a post that I wish I declined rewards on.

Conclusions: if you're after the money, services like dtube, dlive and utopian have their own chubby accounts that will pay you regardless of size or whale friends as long as your content is what they're looking for.

If you're after the engagement - engage. And never stop experimenting. I also had an unreasonable payout on a meme I made on dmania a while back. Most of it was from the dmania account, and I felt ashamed for the shitposting and tempted to create a stealth user for dmania alone so my account doesn't end up a dumpster.

Sure, I can post 10 times a day and be a little heijin all by myself. But what would that give me? What would that contribute to the community? Exactly nothing. I am not greedy. As long as I am making enough to live comfortably, the blockchain will remain my primary source of income. I am not here to rape the reward pool, just create and contribute while still paying the bills.