Hello, a teenage girl.
Way I see it, two laws govern popularity: supply & demand, and sturgeon's law.
Meaning, the bigger the potential fanbase and fewer competitors for their attention, the greater your odds of attracting a larger crowd; and that number grows exponentially at the apex of the genre.
If you're gonna publish random themeless art, there likely aren't too many takers. Deviant had those by the boatload. More important for popularity than being a technically talented artist is innovation. For example, andrew hussie had been creating these crudely stylised, humouristic, meta and crowd controlled webcomics for years, yet his explosion in popularity came along with a specific brand of narration drawing some die hard fans to the epic.
Let me ask though, why do you want more likes? What do you mean by getting your art out there? Whenever I start a project and invest days or weeks of design and refinement into it, I'm not motivated by the thought of some nobody seeing the final product and going "that's cool, but it needs more lasers". Rather, getting to spend time mastering a skill is the goal. Expectations of other people's approval never fail to disappoint until you pass the point of their motivation about your work exceeding your own, and by then it becomes a responsibility & obligation which you must maintain despite of personal fluctuations. It's hardly a painless path to tread.
