Begging for Votes and Follows - Does it Work?

I just saw a post by @carlos-cabeza, "Images Free Gif For STEEMIT Community, Upvote - Follow - Resteem (ANIMATED BANNERS FOR PLACES AT THE END OF YOUR POST)" offering some pretty cool upvote/follow/resteem animated-gifs, and for those of you interested in that sort of thing, they are definitely worth checking out. But so far, I've resisted the temptation to ask for votes and follows after each post. However, it did inspire me to write about my lingering question as to whether it provides any real advantage, as opposed to just "annoying" those who are already engaged in your content to some degree.

Perhaps I'm being naively optimistic, but if someone's truly interested in your post, and possibly your whole content stream, they don't need to be "reminded" to upvote and/or follow. And if they do, they're probably not gonna be the actively engaged "holy grail"-type of subscriber we're all really looking for. But of course, when the more followers one has is a metric and "status symbol" in itself, that's probably irrelevant. So the real question is, does it actually work?

I know for me, when I see such "requests", I find it more distracting than anything, and I feel a slight "peeve" over it, but perhaps that's just me. If the post "resonates" for me, I'm gonna vote for it. If a quick glance at the author's stream tells me this is someone I want to follow, I will. If I find myself repeatedly upvoting content from the same author, by the 3rd or 4th upvote I'm probably already "following" as well.

We had also tried all these different promotional "tactics" over the years with our YouTube channel as well (more on that here), and we really didn't find it helped all that much there either. What we did do though is let people know they can also follow us on facebook, twitter, etc. One thing that did seem to make a bit of difference attracting more attention on YouTube early on was our animated YouTube channel icon. We "cried a bit" when YouTube took that one away from us.

Another side effect of all this "duplicate" content at the end of each post is that it adds more arguably useless "bloat" to the blockchain. While that's probably not much of a concern to most, my programming-side thinks about stuff like that. Call it my small part in not unnecessarily "cluttering up" my environment (ie. should I clutter the blockchain with another edit of my post over just a small typo). I wonder if the Steem dev team has considered the feasibility of implementing some sort of compression / deduplication algorithm into the blockchain to help make it a bit more manageable, and slightly less unwieldy, as it grows exponentially larger over time. Another idea might be the addition of a special "footer" section, to be appended to all the user's posts, and can be easily changed or even removed if desired.

So, if I start adding these images to all my posts, will it give my subscriber count a turbo-boost? While that's probably just wishful thinking, I'd like nothing more than to objectively put this topic to rest for both myself and for the community once and for all.

• From your own experiences on steemit, do you find you are more likely to upvote or follow someone because they somehow "reminded" you to do so?
• Do you find that if you add reminders in your own posts, your readers are more likely to "take action"?

For the record, saying "it can't hurt" is not an answer.

And now that you've all been "reminded" to upvote, follow, and resteem, please comment and share your thoughts below...