I totally agree and I've surprised by how many people use this! The follow-for-follow schemes are never really useful on any platform.

To be honest, I've been struggling with what to do about this on Medium. I just started a second account here under a pseudonym for another purpose, and it's really tempting to do something like this to get to the 100 followers required for the MPP quickly. I do know it's still better to just stick to creating good content, but... It's tempting :D