I have the same issues with the place as you. Unfortunately the # of followers you have doesn't mean anything if they aren't good quality followers. It's really hard to find loyal friends who will regularly comment. The best practice is to ignore your followers list and just focus on who you follow. I only follow people who are worth my time who reply to my comments or comment on my posts. I look at my friends who are getting good comments and try to build a relationship with those people. It takes a lot of work to find good commenters but they are out there.
I do that to but sometimes you forget people especially if you follow over two hundred people I'll see someone I really like go to their page and they will have three good steems I missed but yes I do that to , its alot of networking not always with good end results before the fork I made like ten dollars a day I had a fifty dollar post when my rep was 40, people really liked my stuff don't understand what happened again I'm saying this about money but it's not about the money its about the votes
I feel like things got bad when they updated the site with the HF-19. People stopped voting because it drains voting power. Like minnows get 10 good votes a day before their power gets drained so people don't vote as much. It's also become harder to get whale votes. I have a higher rep and SP but I'm struggling to get votes when that wasn't the case before the update.