The ghosts, the dead, the bots and I

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I've been coming across a lot of posts talking about their dead followers, that to me means followers who are only occupying the followers numbers in ones blog, a lot of people sounded surprised at the results they got when they ran the application that detects these numbers, was I surprised at mine?

I think about a month a go, I crossed the 1,000 followers mark, normally I should have thrown a feat and been all shouty about it, but it was obvious to me that 90% my followers were ghosts or very much inactive, and 5% are bots, I guess. Inactive because they do not interact with my posts either by commenting or by Upvotes, I don't need an application to tell me that.

So I tried to understand, how and why it has to be so. On steemit and basically every other dapp running on Steem blockchain, users have the ability to control their interaction with whom they follow, it's basically a one way traffic, either you follow or not, but limited control on who follows them, infact this is same for majority of social media applications, twitter has a block feature that enables the user to block unwanted followers, instagram has private feature to enable users scrutinize friend invites before approval, which also means that only users who they've allowed to become a follower can have access into and interact with their feed.

For steemit, it's the mute feature, which enables users mute the interactions of unwanted followers on their posts. Meaning, the unwanted followers won't be noticed or seen, a similar description is ghostifying the unwanted follower.

During my first weeks on steemit, due to lack of knowledge and urge to get everything right, up and running, I misunderstood the followership term. I thought the amounts of upvotes receivable were somehow tied to the number of followers gotten, so there was that race. Alas, after a while, steemit proved to me that it wasn't just the conventional social media platform and something's were quite different.

Then I got thinking, I examined myself and something's were brought to light. I have about 400 people I follow, 30% of them because they constantly keep me up to date with what I need to know, 20% of them because, they are super creative and if ever my writing is going to get any better, it will be from constantly learning from them, 20% of them because they took interest in me, my blog, and I in them, 10% of them because at one time they've made a post about something that interested me and I followed to see more, 10% of them because they help to keep calm in times of storms like this. They are filled with positivity and I can tell you that extra energy comes in handy. Thank you @meno @cryptoandcoffee.

There are users who I've brought in as well, so I follow them to keep up with their activities.

However, do I interact with all these 400 and something users? No, except if interacting also entails reading their posts and not leaving a comment. A lot of time, I read posts and it's not all I comment on or upvote, and it doesn't have anything to do with whether the post made sense to me or not, more so, breeding generic comments such as nice post pal is frowned upon by the community even when the post is actually just nice, this has put me in the position of being a dead follower even to some people.

I cannot control users that follow me, I can't say hey don't follow me if you have nothing to say, but I can improve the rate and way at which I interact with the people I follow. Else why am I following them.

I think if every user can have this mindset, then the rate of ghost or dead followers will reduce. If you want change, then it begins from you. This doesn't mean I will interact with every post on my feed , but knowing I don't want to be a dead follower, I will try to improve my interactions.

I really do hope to begin to grow an interactive following, imagine interaction from 50% of the amount of your followers. This is the steemit I hope to see. And it begins with you me.