Complicated Platform, for Me, for Now!

I'm trying to grasp how this platform operates, unfortunately, aside from the financial aspect, which I started understanding slowly, sort of, there's the popularity of the posts.

Which posts get the most attention? Why some posts are so popular and others are barely seen despite being posted around the same time to the same community with near similar contents: a couple of pictures of a journey in a forest or downtown, some text describing them, and so on.

I understand that the authors have different rankings and number of followers, what I am finding difficulties with is how come authors with about the same number of followers and within the same ranking, an example of two of those were they had between 62 and 65 ranking and 392 and 407 followers respectively, yet the one with the lower numbers gets rewarded higher and the other one gets rewarded less.

I've noticed that in some cases, there are votes with very high value and others with way less, one upvote yields $3 and more than 20 others don't even make a single $.

Have to dig more into this before dedicating proper time to this platform.