What the title says, I have no success with it either here or anywhere else. On youtube I perform more poorly than similar chiptune channels.

But when working on a song it never really strikes me that something is wrong with it or that it's especially bad . . . but they sure must be, judging by the results. . .

I just wish to know what it is that makes it so terrible ;w; any insight ;w;

the fact that you think its terrible is what makes it terrible. be proud of your work no matter if other people enjoy it or not. if you just do it for other people, youre doing it wrong.
i still enjoy my earliest work even though other people downvoted it to death and it ended up on the last places here on botb

in general the shortcut to "sounding good" is very closely imitating the stuff that "sounds good", and then once you've internalized that deeply enough you can put your own spin on that foundation. specific things that have been helpful to me are singing or playing a melody on guitar or piano before putting something in a tracker, simplifying my ideas to give the listener something to linger on, changing instrument timbre, deliberately using functional harmony, and using dynamics.

but really it should be about enjoying yourself.

depends on how you define success, I think it should be at a different boundary for everyone and that it should change depending on what you want to do. something you might have done years ago might not seem as impressive now for example.

as kleeder said, think about your audience. it's ok to make music for other people but think about if that's something you really want to do. there's nothing wrong with enjoying your own music and being your own audience!

I think that to get better at something you need to look back and figure out what you want to change, then do your best to apply that in future things. maybe try to pick up different ideas from music that you enjoy listening to. there's also nothing wrong with experimenting sometimes, one great thing about botb is that there's plenty of opportunity to do that.

I feel like being successful has a lot more to do with luck than the quality of your music. There's a lot of really popular music out there that I think is hot trash, so I don't think you should attribute value to your music based on how much "success" it brings you.
However, when you don't like your own music, that's when you should really focus on improving.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions <3

I am sure that you are in fact right that popularity isn't exactly the same as goodness, but the problem is it's the only form of goodness that is really measurable, everything else is just fuzzy opinions, and I don't feel safe resting on those ;w;

I can make something that I think sounds really dope, but if no people back me up, how can I prove that it's not totally worthless? That's why I care so much about other people's opinions all the time ;w;

yeah, success just a numbers game. ya gotta get lucky.

Agree with everything that's been said here.

struggled with this for years and years. sometimes the answer is material: you really do need external validation sometimes to encourage yourself, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I've come to realize that "good" music is just an amalgamation of techniques learned from other people. a certain rhyrhm, a certain chord progression, a certain way of voicing harmony. it's not magical or inaccessible to anybody. you just take some of those tropes and recombine them your own way, then go on to learn more tropes. you use their foundation, try to understand it, and tweak it to come up with new experiments. I made Bad Garden because a youtube video taught me about 6/9 chords and I wanted to try it out. so I took my existing bag of tricks and added that on top.

the best inroads I've made was through transcribing other songs. it's a tough practice, but it really helps. because it's you jotting down their notes, and you can steal those ideas.

but I've also massively been helped by specific advice. someone told me "your use of harmony is really vague" and once i understood the criticism, it changed the way i wrote music forever. this is hard to come by, so don't count on it, but if you get it, cherish it. that's how you can create more detalied music

i think we already said the most important things here.
before we start running in circles, pls read here for more: https://battleofthebits.com/academy/GroupThread/21764/competitions+make+me+sad+and+angry+and+make+me+cry+like+a+tiny+infant/