Just a couple of points to add to the conversation..
Hard work is no guarantee of success. It increases your chances but doesn't guarantee anything. You have to produce something that people want. You could spend hours to produce an outstanding article but if it is on a subject that not many people on hive care about then it probably won't receive much in the way of upvotes. As far as frequency, I don't think you have to churn out multiple posts a day but posting something twice a week will probably give better results (or quicker results) than posting once a month.
The problem is Hive just doesn't have the critical mass to guarantee that your interests will be shared by a significant number of people.
Of course, this assumes most people of Hive upvote like I do. That is, I upvote and comment on things that I like and/or interest me. To be sure, it can still be a challenge to find those things on Hive.
I realize that autovotes, whales voting for friends, etc. affects all of this but I guess I consider that an alternate path and obtaining those kinds of votes is more work than fun. Building a following of people interested in the content you produce can be a slow process. Especially on Hive where the user base isn't exactly skyrocketing at the moment. Engagement on some place like Facebook is going to be much higher right now because there are so many more people there. Until Hive gets significantly more users, that won't change.
Facebook though, will be more genuine because there is no money involved. Here, you get "friends" based on the power of your votes most of the time. Statistically, you get more engagement on your posts if your wallet is "handsome". And there are many comments that are incredibly generic to confirm it.
I don't know... I mean there are certainly some of those spammy comments on hive but they tend to be self limiting because 1) they don't achieve the desired affect and 2) they are likely to lead to downvotes, especially when left on whale accounts. And Facebook has its own problems with spam though it takes a slightly different form.
Also, while whale accounts may attract more comments statistically, that's true on places like Facebook and Youtube as well. The more popular you are, the bigger the audience you have...the bigger your audience, the bigger your account is likely to get (though that doesn't necessarily translate into money on Facebook...it certainly does on youtube though).
Facebook's advantage isn't in being more "genuine"...it's just in having orders of magnitude more users. That isn't likely to change quickly.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
That's kind of what I've said over the last few months this "Work hard...." is subjective. I feel I work hard but as you said. Probably nobody likes what I post. They do on Social Media though. 🤣🤣🤣