That's an easy way to lose a bunch of motivation when it comes to writing and publishing.
If you've been writing for a while then you probably have at least one article that you're extremely proud of, but didn't do very well, and other articles that you wrote without thinking too much about them that received hundreds of upvotes.
Sometimes, that just happens without you doing anything. The articles you think are your best don't get any attention, while mediocre articles you write in maybe a few minutes get a bunch of upvotes and resteems and likes on different social media platforms.
I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly why that happens, but what I can tell you is that comparing your best work with your mediocre work, focusing only on the number of upvotes you receive, is not a good way to judge whether what you do is good or not.
The reason that's bad is because while success is often and mostly defined by the amount of work you put in and the quality of what you do, luck is also a factor, a pretty big one.
If you compare your hard work that didn't get noticed with mediocre work that got a lot of attention, without taking luck into consideration, that will completely ruin your analysis at times and make you think that you should focus on mediocre content rather than something better.
For example, I had many, many articles that I really liked writing in the past. I had huge articles I wrote trying to help people, or simply articles I wrote trying to share a story, either here or on other websites.
Most of those article didn't receive more than 20 upvotes or likes.
However, I had mediocre articles that I wrote in maybe 10 or 15 minutes, that helped me get quite a lot of money, simply because the right people found what I wrote and shared it or recommended me to some services like @curie .
That's not to say I'm not grateful - I am, quite a lot.
But if I were to look at the articles that made me the most money, and try to replicate the same quality, I would usually end up with mediocre and even bad content, all because I tried to replicate an article I got lucky with.
What you should always do is look at the work you're proud of, and try to create similar work in the future, even if you don't always get rewarded for it. Doing your best to create amazing things will not only help you make content that you're proud of, but it will also help you get better at what you do.
Writing mediocre articles will only mean that you'll always be able to write mediocre articles. Forcing yourself to write great things means that in time, you'll get good enough to
write great things constantly.
While rewards can be used to analyze how well your content is doing, that's not always the case. Not taking luck into consideration and considering our most rewarded articles to also be the best ones can lead to the wrong idea that mediocre content is gonna get you a bunch of money, which is, mostly, not true.
Receiving $50 every 6 months for a mediocre article isn't better than receiving $10 a month for a great one. Always strike for quality!