Congrats! There used to be a way to count your existing followers- Dead Followers, a tool created by a user. Unfortunately it is under maintenance at time of this comment. It may also be gone permanently, I am not sure, but it would be a way to get a little more of an accurate count- minus bots of course.

I agree that we need more manual curation here on Steemit. And it should never be a popularity contest as I've seen on other platforms (who incidentally started off with good intentions)