My advice would be to alter your perception of what going somewhere means. Looking for immediate public acceptance or reward in an incredibly competitive field basically doesn't work. You'll get burned out far before anything happens. You need to try and improve the quality of your work each time, How impactful it is, how interesting it is. Set goals for your own personal development and when you achieve those goals consider it a win. Keep successfully iterating on that process and you'll eventually find yourself producing much better work. You'll come to a point where you are three times as good or five times as good as when you started, And still no one will really care. Keep going until you're sure it will work and still no one will really care. push beyond that until it's 10, 20 and 30 times the quality it was when you started until you feel like completely giving up.
Once you've worked so long and so hard and improved so much that you can't imagine ever going any farther, Keep going. One day when you're not expecting it, You'll release one of those things that's 60 times the quality of where you started, And someone will notice it.
Basically you need to be your own judge of how your work is progressing until the point that the public notices you. Take satisfaction from the understanding that you are progressing and quit worrying about what other people think. I know it's counterintuitive but you'll develop a fan base much faster once you stop using their approval as a metric for whether or not to continue developing.
I'd also note from experience that the curve does not behave like you would think it would. It's more like an upside down waterfall in practice than it is a gentle slope. You'll get no response at all or very little for a long time, Then there's just some random day when it kind of takes off exponentially. That's been my experience with basically every art and design venture.
TLDR, Unless you're in the in crowd (Born inside the system), art is almost without exception a marathon rather than a sprint. Focus on making each work an improvement on the work before and take satisfaction from your own knowledge that you've improved. Eventually people will begin to recognize that, But forcing it just makes it harder. There is a very notable exception. If you are already wealthy, Then you can just force it via advertising. Wad up an old piece of paper in your room throw it in the trash can and take a picture of it, Then buy a PR agent And $4 million of ad spend. You will be absolutely shocked by how fast people line up trying to buy that photograph of a wadded up piece of paper.
In case you do have tons of disposable income like about a third of the people in America, Try this experiment. Buy the indie talk pro subscription for fifty bucks a year or however much it is. Then just post random stuff. The regulars won't pay any attention but the people from the street that come in will begin treating you with reverence and respect after seeing the tiny jpeg of a badge next to your name. They will perceive your statements as more significant and treat you as a more legitimate artist. When people with 10 times your credentials talk without a badge, they will shove that person out of the way and listen to you because you have the badge. Read up on the Stanford prison experiment and you might gain some understanding of how art is received. The majority of people like what they are told to like by advertising or simple cues. The twelve hundred dollar iphone is incredibly successful. If you disassemble one and look at the parts it's a $200 phone with $4 billion of ad spend hyping it. If you try to tell an average person that the iphone isn't the world's best telephone or that they are overcharging for it, you'll end up in a fist fight on the street for your heresy. Seriously, buy that indie talk Pro subscription, It's cheap and you'll learn a lot from the experience.
Myself and several others I know of dropped that subscription specifically for this reason. We all love indietalk, But if you're working hard for years to improve your art, and you notice that people are far more impressed by your badge jpeg than they are by the thousands of hours of work you've put in, it honestly feels pretty insulting. If you're not really working that hard and you just want respect and attention the badge is the way to go. I'll note here that the Indietalk site is not doing anything wrong, and it was the response from the general public external to the site that turned me off to the subscription. Also I'm pretty broke, lol.
idk)