Great post and lots of truth within it!
In the first week I may have stepped into the pitfall of follow-you/follow-me requests!
But I rather quickly stopped with that. I rather have 100 genuine followers who do interact with than 10000 fake, dead or uninterested followers!
It is also true that betting involved into a community helps a lot. Not only because it is easier this way to find people with the same interests but also because almost all communities have some wintered steemians who are always willing to help tou with understanding the steem ecosystem. Really glad to have co-founded the sbc ( steem betting community @sbcbot). The idea is help starting new steemians who do want to post about sports betting!

I am running a world cup contest with nu follow, upvote or resteem requirements to enter. This is how it should be done and how I like it! People who do participate can follow me voluntarily or not!
I also do not require that people follow me back when I do decided to follow. This because they maybe are not interested in the kund of posts I write but still I can be interested posts!

@acidyo feel free to join my contest! 

It is also true that how more power and rep you have, the more people are interested into following, hoping that the success will drip do to them!

Once again a great post and regardless of my vaporizing voting power, this kindof post does deservea 100% upvote!
Hope to see more of these in the future!