I've made a lot of posts that have taken a considerable amount of my time to make, mostly video edits. I don't think any of them (over 100 across 2 accounts) have ever gotten above ~50 upvotes. About a year ago, I made a post of a meme with the guy getting kicked out of the office saying "High effort and quality gifs". It got over 500 upvotes. That made it seem like people actually want that. In response, I've spent many hours doing video edits, even creating !high_quality_gifs@lemmy.sdf.org (since the LW community is parked and never will receive posts), and making content for that community until I started to get burned out on my hobby. A large percentage of what I have posted has been OC on principle. I've learned that people just don't care.
Why in the world should I keep making video edits when the entirety of the fun has been sapped out by people not caring? I could spend 8-10 hours on a project and people simply won't care because it isn't instantly digestible. Things like memes and 40-100 year old comic strips do incredibly well. It seems like the only 2 examples of high effort that get some engagement are SDF's own !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org , and !custardfist@feddit.nl. Notable mention to some of the pics communities.
I guess what I'm really ranting about here is not that the things I make aren't appreciated (because the very few comments are generally positive), but the fact that most people don't even want it around or care.
I'm not sure I can keep up the grind anymore. The joy has been sapped out of my hobby. And for what? An instantaneous downvote with every post.
I hear you. I tried to get the ancient coins sub off the ground for months by posting elaborate pieces and links to relevant articles etc...
No engagement whatsoever. I could've "posted" this to a local file on my pc instead of Lemmy and it wouldn't have made any difference.
Still not going back to Reddit though.
Maybe with that community, you could crosspost to !historyartifacts@lemmy.world and get some traction. I think there is overlap there.
But yeah. People are really quick to say "be the change you wish to see" without ever had the perspective of putting in the work.
I'm planning to make a "comeback" of sorts once I have better pictures to post. Until now it's been cell phone pics, the next batch will be high res macro images with a sigma lens.