Thanks for the advice! Okay, here are my posts in the past couple weeks, with hour long they took me (just the research, photography, editing, and writing), and how much currency they made:

Big Pharma, Tech, and Media are Downplaying Covid-19 Vaccine Dangers
5 hours
$0.16 (so far)

Cleaning a Trove of Very Old Filthy Copper Coins
4 hours
$0.50

Experts worry new Covid variant will "escape" vaccine effectiveness
3 hours
$0.10

I knew this YouTube ban was coming
1 hour
$0.61

Google is EVIL for Censoring Vaccine Information!
4 hours
$0.20

Martial Law and House Arrest sweep across Canada
3 hours
$0.09

They're Putting Vaccines in the Microchips!
5 hours
$2.57 ($2 of that is from 3Speak)

Reclining Buddha winter garden update
1 hour
$0.61

Now might finally be the right time to buy HIVE
2 hours
$1.08

Cannabis CURES Cancer (redone for 2021)
2 hours (plus 100+ hours on original post)
$0.69

30 hours (for just over $6), that is fairly typical for me.

The week before that I had an unusually-high $15 payout for The Treatment may be WORSE than the Disease which I put about 10 hours into.

So the amount of time put in seems to matter sometimes, and other times not as much. I think we have known that for years about this place, though, that's not new. Of course there's an element of luck to it.

As for what topic does well, it seems to be my covid-19 coverage, and my crypto articles that do best lately. And yeah over the past 4 years, my cannabis content has never done well on the blockchain. It has always been my other topics that bring the higher rewards, but my cannabis activism is the most important to me, so I continue to focus on it. Stuff like my Soil to Oil series tends to make less than a dollar, while posting about STEEM or HIVE seems to bring in payouts. (Do you know of any software or sites that offer analysis of these kinds of data? I'm just going off memory and scrolling down my feed.)

I don't think every post should be a winner, and I'm not saying that :)

I DO wish I could find a way to earn some pay for my efforts, or at least not have my savings dwindle away.

As you know, I can't buy in and out, I can only earn and hold, so that's what I've been doing for 3-4 years. And as you know, I also put in 0.2 BTC back then, value now $7200 USD. And as you know, my entire net worth on the blockchain, including my wife and some contributions from others, is $1200 USD, which includes that lost BTC. So each year, as HIVE/STEEM lose value, and my holdings (crypto life savings) continue to fall toward zero, all I can do is hope things turn around. Because "try harder" isn't an option, as I have already been doing that for years now.

One thing I probably did wrong from the start was mixing my cannabis content. I should have had drutter, and drutter420. Maybe it's not too late to do that, who knows. If I'm going to stick around long term, that's probably what I should do, stop talking about the topic most dear to me, in the same place as the topics that make the bigger payouts.

I am just not good at this, in general. I create quality content but I don't market it effectively. I put out several well-researched articles and videos per week, and make $3, where many bloggers here put out a handful of snapshots taken of palm trees and weeds growing in their neighborhood, and make $100+ consistently. A magic formula! Some of them have brought in dozens of friends, each with smart phones and accounts on the blockchain, taking photos of sunsets and mountains and banana trees and pelicans, or selfies with their breakfast plate, instant $10 every time. Whole families and even villages each with multiple accounts, each earning several dollars with each shitpost or nonsense that nobody cares about or wants to see. I even tried shitposting like that a couple times long ago, and it didn't work, at all. The magic isn't available for Canadians, it seems. Many of my posts ARE the kind of post that goes viral. I've had some of my posts shared on FaceBook hundreds of times, like my research post about Neem. That brought dozens of people to the blockchain, alone. Do shitposts of shrubs growing on the roadside in Venezuela bring people to websites? No, but that's what gets paid (supported and encouraged).

I also don't do well at supporting various random tags/communities in exchange for votes. Or "scratch my back if I scratch yours" deals. Or buying votes. I want to get paid for my content. So basically I'm just not meant for this place.

I saw long ago this blockchain was more about who you know and how you play the game, than what you have to offer in the way of knowledge, effort, contribution, art, skill, and so on. I continue to hope that changes, but at this point, it doesn't seem very likely. And it also doesn't seem likely I'm going to get good at playing the game and knowing the right people, cuz that aint how I roll, so I need to face facts and figure out if I'm going to keep trying (like a sucker?), or take my whooping and move along.

A year ago I signed up on LBRY, and now when I put out a video (almost half the time I post), I upload it there as well. So I have far less content there than here on Hive, but it's basically the same stuff. There, I've accumulated 10k LBC so far, and it's coming in at the rate of about 20 per day. LBC are worth $0.10 at the moment, so I've earned $1000 by copying some of my content over there. LBC looks poised for a 10x move up, or more.

Here on Hive I'm also nearing 10k tokens, with a current value just over $1000. So the amounts earned are the same, but that's only 1 year of LBRY, compared to 4 years of Steem/Hive. And I put $7200 worth of BTC into Steem/Hive which is gone. I didn't put anything at all (except my content) into LBRY. I don't even have to curate every 2 hours there. I don't have to manage several keys, or lose everything. I don't have to comment, or support communities with silly off-topic tags, or worry about downvotes, etc etc etc. LBRY isn't perfect by a longshot, I'm just saying it's miles ahead of this place, for me, when it comes to being paid for content.

Of course, being paid isn't all that matters to me. But like many others here, I hoped to be able to earn a living (or part of a living) doing what I love and what I'm good at. It seemed like a lock, but it has eluded me, and so many others as well. Year after year, it provides only for the lucky and/or connected few, not the majority of content-creators, even high-quality ones like myself. I hoped I could turn my lifestyle of growing plants, photography, research, activism, and writing, into a small income, to starve the beast and gain independence from the system, which I find reprehensible and evil, more and more so as time goes by. Not taking its handouts, or contributing to its wars of aggression, really appealed to me. And I believed in crypto, the decentralization and privacy aspects especially, and wanted to support that. I put my money where my mouth was, and gave it 100% effort, and still came up waaaaaay in the hole. Over and over and over again.

But I will take your advice and work on a long post about my garden. It's just 4 little seedlings slowly growing through the winter season, so not much going on at the moment there.