Well done CW. Good advice about the follow back.
Before simply following someone who followed me, I check to see how many people they are following. It's amazing, there are folks who manage to follow several thousand people, even though they've only been on the platform a few weeks! For the reasons you described, I try to avoid following those folks.
I miss the Twitter function that displays a popup of the number of followers and follows when you hover the cursor above a user. Unfortunately, the screening I describe above is a bit tedious on Steemit.
I would also absolutely love a function that would show me only followers who have upvoted and or commented on at least two of my posts. I consider them two way street followers. I would then like the favorite function you mentioned, and I would place those who did right by me on my own "favorites" list.
I think doing that would eventually allow meaningful communities to form. It would also give users a tool for culling one way street follows so that the volume problem you mentioned could be reduced. Until then I do this:
Good post. Upvoted @roused
Agreed - If I see someone post and their post contains - follow me... etc.. then part of my mind discounts the value of their post because they're begging for follows. I think either your content should be useful/interesting and people want to follow you - or it isn't, in which case - why would they.
I don't think it helps you asking for follows as anyone who uses steemit knows how to follow someone that they want to follow, so it just seems desperate. but again - it's like in the Twitter early days where people just followed as many people as they could to try and get back-follows from 'anyone'.
Hopefully steemit community members actually want to form relationships and get to know people here and not just come here to spam content and beg for followers they don't know or want to know.