Sure, every newbie can be confused or misled at the beginning but the more you get familiar with the platform, the more one should improve. I even unfollowed users that I didn't see as beneficial to me - All those I ignorantly followed when I first joined steemit. My feeds was then flooded with irrelevant posts and annoying ones. I had to take action and unfollow many of them. 

I have e however asked for upvotes before. I just needed the encouragement or I needed help winning a contest then. I do post promotion sometimes, not for the upvotes but for more people to see the post. It is discouraging if you task you brain to make a post but at the end, only 2 people view the content of the post. It is just like a waste of time.