For the longest time I thought that quality of my posts and my online digital designs is what was important, but soon found that most online websites do not care about quality, they are more concerned with popularity. Popularity was the first step in winning contests and quality came second.
Example you could publish a quality post here on Bubblews that is well thought out, has perfect grammar and the topic is one you are excited about. The words flow from you and you are so happy to write and share your post with your followers. You publish the post and it does not do the homepage rotation. As a result you get 0 likes and 0 comments.
The reason for the poor performance of your post is not due to the topic or how well it is written, but instead because you are not popular. Your name was not recognized and your followers did not click onto like within 60 seconds after you published so the post never moved forward to do the homepage rotation.
So if you want to succeed then you must be popular. When you are popular at any website you will find that being online is more fun.