Dead followers (including bots and follow for follow seekers) are disheartening for anyone posting and hoping for engagement.
I recently went on a quest to find my real followers and what they are doing. That included commenting and upvoting at full power 3 posts per day, plus resteeming one per day for a week. I had very few replies on my comments, and only one who commented on my own posts during or after that week, from the followers I engaged with on their blogs (or resteemed).
Ah, and while visiting their profiles during that week, I noticed many users had the voting power at 100%.
So, my quest had two results: first I was surprised to discover some of my followers, their talents, their topics of interest, etc., and second, I was and am disappointed by the lack of engagement, may it be comments, upvotes, resteemes or all of them.
The trend of curating post has somewhat lost.. there was a time when steemit used to split 50% 50% rewards between author and curators.. so people were generally inclined towards curating other posts.. since the split has been shifted to 75-25% in favour of authors, getting upvotes have become a tiresome task.. i wish if they could change back the split to 50-50, you will see a lot more upvotes on your posts...