Sort:  

https://steemd.com/@swingtrades

you will not be able to comment, vote etc. for some hours or until tomorrow (unless you power up steem or get RCs delegated by a bigger account).
This is since HF20 (which is pretty new).

Those early followers are usually bots and crap, yes. But this is normal (and has become less with HF20).
Trending is full of trash so I wouldn't look there so much for content.
Otherwise you can find a lot of good content here.
steemit as interface is not so pretty, so many use others like busy or steempeak (I use @steempeak)

https://steemworld.org/swingtrades is a great tool too.

What happens is that like any social network it is important to have followers to share the content with someone, but there are really people who exaggerate and do not read you, I try to follow people who really publish things that I like.