Follow me and I'll follow you back" has to be the most counterproductive method in practice to actually gain a captive audience, but this site and the chat are plagued with the request.
Not quite as bad as upvote me and I'll upvote you, but close. Circle jerking can quickly destroy a site. But I think that reputation numbers and SP here help mitigate that. A lot of 25's with low Steem Power voting for each other probably doesn't have much influence on allocation of the reward pool.
Agreed. I'm so thankful for the influential users who sift through all the posts looking for quality content! Their diligence really helps support the best authors and keep them coming back!