200 Followers: Analyzing Followers vs. Upvotes Received

Followers vs. Upvotes

I've long suspected that the bulk of the followers I've attained have been bots of some sort. I recognize a few friendly faces from @originalworks writing contests and a couple other users that I've had correspondence with, but the bulk of my 203 followers seem to appear out of thin air with names I don't recognize. I recently saw a post from one of the steemians I follow @krnel (great content btw, check his page out) about him reaching 9000 followers and wondering how many were actually following and I finally got curious enough to analyze my followers, so I used https://mysteemitfriends.online/ as a resource to track who I have received upvotes from since my account creation in January of 2018 and I cross referenced that with the entire list of my followers. Here's what I found:

Out of 203 followers, only 7 have upvoted me
That's only 3.45% of the people that have followed me that have actually curated my content. Here's a graphical representation:

So, you would expect that out of those who have upvoted me, they might make up a large percentage of the upvotes my account receives right? Well, it's certainly more than 3%, but that is also surprisingly low. Here's the graph of those upvotes (excluding self-votes) for reference.

Who Is Following Me?

Now, I don't want to be misunderstood, I'm not implying that the number of followers I've accrued or their upvote participation is too low. I don't post all that often, maybe once a or twice a week when I have time, so I don't expect to have built up a large base of followers that seek out my posts to upvote at this time. I'm more focused on the disparity between the amount of followers and how many have ever upvoted me. I may very well have some followers interested in my work that haven't elected to upvote me yet which is perfectly fine, but 203 is nowhere in the ballpark of people that are actually following my work.

I'm not sure what the reason for the difference is, I first thought it might be bots of some sort, but what would be the benefit in a bot simply following someone but never curating their content at all? I suppose I've had some messages sent to my wallet for resteem services, I could see the potential for a bidding bot service to create a pseudo-user that automatically follows newly created content users to later advertise their resteem service to. I'm fairly confident that occurs, and perhaps it's the most simple explanation. However, I haven't received messages from anywhere near 196 bots trying to advertise to me, so I don't think that is the whole picture.

I'm sure another aspect would be users who were interested in a comment or article I wrote but either were low on voting power or were still skeptical of my work and not ready to support yet. Maybe some of them even decided they don't like me or my work, but just didn't see any reason to unfollow me yet because I don't post enough to annoy them?

Maybe it's big evil corporations or the government planting their own bots to mine data on steemit users to try and cross reference with other data for nefarious purposes! Gotta love a good conspiracy theory right? Whatever it is, I'd love to know but I doubt I'll get an answer. I do think this is worth keeping an eye on though, I think I might incrementally perform more analysis like this as my follower base increases. Hopefully I'll see the percentage of actual people that curate my content go up!