Seems everyone needs to do one of these posts on their followback policy. Man, I didn't even know I had a followback policy.
But here's the scoop for any n00bs, especially those who shout "Follow me!" in the comments everywhere: "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."
You might have got used to follows or adds on MySpace, Twitter or Facebook, where basically no metrics are really useful and so what metrics there are have become proxy measures for success. We can argue all day about whether I should be happy with having 50, 500, 5,000 or 5 million followers on Twitter and which of these are more successful. It doesn't matter really and here it's even more irrelevant to well anything at all.
This is a reading and writing platform. And most content is more than 140 characters. Because of that, it has much more in common with the original blogging platforms. Fifteen years ago, there was no built-in following function, you just went to look at the people you liked and as time went on, you subscribed to their RSS feed, so there was a feeling of how many readers you had, but I always said I was happy if me and my cat read every post, I didn't need much more. And I always kept my feed reader tidy. I paid attention to who I was reading regularly and I pruned the collection to make sure I wasn't in e-mail land, skipping over pointless messages. That means I would follow a fairly small number of people on a regular basis and read more widely when those people linked to others, or I saw good comments on posts.
So now here, in Steemit, what's up? I follow 115 people, but that's because I clicked a button a few times at the beginning when I didn't really know what I was doing. I practically never read most of those people, and some of them probably haven't written anything for six months or more. I'm followed by 280 people, which feels great as a little hit of vanity, but I know it probably doesn't mean very much to those people either. I read a small group of people every day. I have a bot (steemvoter) voting up every post of a slightly larger group. Then I will read around, people who I see linked to, plus people who comment on my stuff or stuff I read who seem interesting and then every now and then I'll take a random dip in the firehose of new content, just see who's turned up. It's unlikely I'll ever follow anyone ever again (unless something changes to add value that way).
Thing is, on Steemit, you have other, more useful measures of how well people are doing, how long they've been around, how committed they are to the platform - and because this is a blockchain, you can poke around in anyone's stats. In my opinion, you will thrive here by improving the network. That means making good original work, commenting intelligently, building connections with others and being a responsible member of the community. That's a lot of work, it's not impossible, but it's never going to be as easy as shouting for people to follow you.
The bottom line
If you spam my comments (ie you post the same stuff you've posted elsewhere, or just ask for a follow, or pimp your unrelated post) I will ignore you. I haven't had to flag anyone yet, but repeat offenders will be ignored and flagged.
If you comment with something interesting or valuable, contributing to the conversation the root post has started, then I will upvote you (currently, this is usually about 15-20% VP which comes out to about 5c worth of SP to keep you building your empire)
If I've got to know you over time and we're having a conversation, I may push up the Voting Power slider to give you a quarter or half a dollar! (But also remember to be nice to people on the way up... etc - my 100% vote will not be worth 50c for ever.)
And i reserve the right to do whatever I damn well please, so really don't come back in the comments and say "on July 1st you said... now where's my upvote?!"
OK Public Service Announcement over, now I've got to go mow the lawn.