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.