I'm sure many of you have similar experiences, especially if your relatively new the platform, meaning you've joined this year. I was onboard pre hardfork-19 and witnessed a huge change on the platform with the advantage self upvoting.
commenting
The Best way to earn on here is probably to follow a bunch whales, and try leave sincere comments on their post although this could it sounds easy, it requires a lot of time and effort. Typically you want to be one the first commenters on post as it will surely upvoted. However their are some whales who actually read through comments and upvote comments that are sincere. This was a good start for me, but eventually I just didn't have the free time anymore so I just gave up. Another thing was that I had tendency to leave good comments but they weren't really sincere, I was sort of just pandering trying to get upvotes..As you'll notice their are a lot of fake and overly nice comments left on whale blogs, that are more or less shitty blogs.
Blogs
I'm not one to talk about having a good blog as I know mine are shitty, but don't be surprised if you see blog post that has a shit ton of mindless content with a lot of grammatical errors earn $50 - $100 per post, its because they're whales and it doesn't matter what they post. So I recommend just buying a crap ton of STEEM POWER and Power UP/DOWN constantly, the more SP you have the more your upvote will be. The kicker is that your post gets more recognition also with the higher self-upvote you have.
So why did you get burnt?
"try leave sincere comments" why is it an effort to be sincere? If your a genuine good person it should be easy to leave a sincere post.
Good luck with it dude I hope it works out for you....(I actually mean that I wasnt trying).