Down voting and "follow for follow"

Although I’ve been on Steem for several months now it wasn’t until last week that I made an #introduceyourself post.

I was a bit perturbed by the comments section [ see: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@saronym/it-s-me ] in that post as I found that most people who bothered to type a comment were inviting me to just follow their accounts and like their posts because we're both new to the site. It was a follow for follow and like for like type attitude.

But that’s not the way I use any kind of social media platform. I was kind of discouraged that only one or two users bothered to comment on the actual content of my post or say anything useful at all.

What do other Steemians do about this? Do you ignore it? Do you downvote it? Is it too harsh to downvote that kind of thing?

I haven’t down voted anything yet. I’m just kind of curious what other people think.