If you don't know SteemFollower you should probably check it out to get a bunch more upvotes for your posts. It's basically a site through which you get "points" for your upvotes and those points can then be spent to pay others for their upvotes. SteemFollower gets a share of those points upont every vote. You can also find an explanation video here. If you know Smartsteem, it's similar, only with a different mechanic.

I've been using SteemFollower pretty much since my beginnings on Steem, and it's been a fun way of discovering different content as well as earning a couple of extra upvotes if you don't want to delegate your SP to a bot but stay in control. I haven't done the math from an economic point of view, but it's probably very similar to a delegation as you can keep the curation rewards for yourself.

SteemFollower is being maintained by @mahdiyari, who's also ranked fairly high as a witness. It's still in beta.

For a couple of months now, the official steemfollower.com service has been down, just pointing you to old.steemfollower.com:

The old site is still there, and I kept using it without really bothering. However, I started noticing that I don't get that many upvotes through SteemFollower any more. I'm not sure whether people have stopped using it due to financial reasons (points used to be worth more USD when the Steem / SBD price was higher) or whether the stop of development and the "old" URL may cause a lack of trust. In any case, the number of votes I get is too small to ever deplete my points (I shall mention that you always have to make at least 5 upvotes per day to be eligible for receiving upvotes). This is a real problem, as I obviously used my SP in the past to generate these points, but now I don't get the rewards for that. Truth be told, I didn't get so many of those points, but right now it seems they are close to worthless.

You can also observe the number of online users to be typically between 5 and 20. This used to be much higher, even though I don't recall exact numbers.

What's your strategy?

I'd be really curious about how you deal with the current situation, both on SteemFollower and other vote exchange platforms like Smartsteem. Do you still use them? Do you think they're a good idea? Do they work for you?

At least for SteemFollower, it seems it would need a bit of promotion or some changed mechanics.