We treat steemit as a serious long term investment, where your your work actually comes with interacting with the network itself

that means the work that you do on the platform is eventually going to pay itself off. Regardless what buttons you press. Eventually someone big is going to come along and press like on your post. I look at it as a mix of luck and effort.
It doesn't even matter if you're the one creating the content or the one up-voting it, since both get payed accordingly to the work that they have put into it the platform. But people often have the Misbelief that the users are the one doing the work.

Actually it is the witnesses that are doing all the hard work of keeping track of every post that ever happens.

It's only thanks to them that we can keep track of who posted what and when. Also who upvoted who and who owns what. It's a glorious work of art if you think about it. It allows for people with free computer resources to contribute to keeping track of the history of everything. And it's just a message passing system.

If the witnesses are doing the work then how are we getting payed?

You're a miner by creating content. New blocks are new content. So that means while witnesses do all the hard work of keeping track of everything we do. You the creating the content do the real work. So that means each piece of content is technically proof of work. If this is immutable than after some time there is no way to undo what I have written here.
Nice gif I found I found about immutable servers, unrelated to my content.

In the future I'm going to look how stupid clickbait shit I put out just in hopes of earning a couple of dimes.

At first you don't really get compensated for the ammount of work you put into it.

As this platform develops, you're going to hit your luck to effort zone a couple of times for sure. Just stay involved. I don't even know how my title and text inside the post relate to eachother. it's just some random steem that I let out.

As always I'm going to leave you, with this work of art created by @camilla and or @andrarchy , they're both involved somehow. I feel that they are the ones doing actual work here. They should get more credit than they deserve.