Hmm, I wanted to say this for a while and I guess this space is a good place for that. I personally think posting several times per day is plain unnecessary and really makes it difficult to find good content. Writers like you are an exception, but most people who post several times a day, post shit. Either those are some common pics, some article from internet or so; and it feels irritating that u have to see multiple posts of an author per day, making it very difficult to curate. I think Steemit is meant to be like medium, with good quality articles of adequate length, not tiny posts. It would have been better if Zappl posts remained on zappl and not be posted on Steemit.
Now these things being said in general, I also think that your case is a bit different. Your short posts are also of high quality and deserve the amount they get. Even though I would only like to see 2-3 daily posts from your @traf account, they are in no way of bad quality or even average. They are of high quality. Also no one should have right to downvote your content, when they are themselves raping the reward pool with their threat comments and daily flagging reports looting hundreds of $ daily. What kind of balancing is this. Those particular guys have never touched my posts, but I hate this kind of hypocrisy. This is the reason why I think that Steemit does not a have good future. Downvoting content of people like you is plain shame on steemit's part. This is not the free speech platform as being advertised.
You should know one thing that you are doing nothing wrong by posting multiple times per day and ur posts being downvoted is very very wrong. But ya, if you can limit your daily posts to 2-3, then it would be great.
Short answer : yes
Yes, I think I'm trying to find a middle ground
keep in mind that I'm competing against a completely inactive version of myself that earns about as much or more even with the 5-8 posts at $30-$50
but it may seem like if I really want to contribute, it'll be at a cost to me, in time, effort and money, as compared to just renting it out etc
maybe I can try 1-3 memes a day instead of 5-8 at 15-20 steem self vote instead of 30-50
this will make future investments, like trying to hire ppl to promote on reddit and artists etc out of pocket probably impossible, it's still going to be at a pretty hefty loss compared to doing nothing at all for me, but will hopefully add a bit of value to the platform without the appearance of unfairness.
I'm not sure atm, I'll take a small break and see where people sit and whether I'm up to the challenge of doing this going forward. Not the best time for me to be making content due to irl circumstances, and I was borderline unwilling to do it even at the old rates of pay. I think realistically this won't really be possible unless I get more votes from others on it.
The verdict here is cloudy overall. It's hard to discern whether it's the quality, frequency, it all coming from the same person, appearance of fairness that's at question here, politics or other feelings playing a part, probably some combination of everything.
Thanks for your input, quite a fair viewpoint