I consider myself a pretty decent writer. And I comment on most of the stories I read. Yet, when I look at follower counts, I come up short compared to people who've been on this site for years less than I have. I'm trying not to whine, I just genuinely don't understand why this happens. Can somebody tell me what I'm doing wrong?

7491034
In my experience, if you lurk around in other people's stories, people will eventually follow you... but you prolly already know that. I've gained followers from lurking around my groups, so there's that. Just don't follow people for the hell of it someone got banned a while back.

7491034
You have to understand that the number of followers doesn't (necessarily) mirror the quality of your writing. Being active, nice and helpful in comment sections and forums and just generally being seen (which includes publishing a lot of stories/updates/blogs and promoting your work) is pretty much all it takes. So, in regards to what you are doing wrong... you are not really doing anything wrong. You can try being more active and further improving the quality of your writing--which is something that everybody should try to do regardless of their motivation, to be honest.

The thing with those people who have more followers than you might be that they appear more appealing to a larger audience, came from a different site where they already had a large fanbase, or, most likely, a lot of users, especially the younger and/or overly ambitious ones, tend to follow an insane amount of users and gather follows quickly due to follow-backs. When someone tells them that this borders on breaking the site rules and that it's generally frowned upon, they tend to unfollow most, so that you cannot tell they followed a lot of people. (Don't do that, in addition to being against the site rules, it's also an extremely dishonest and childish thing to do.) They follower count usually drops slightly after this, but it still stays pretty high. Some users, most of whom are banned at this point, also tended to do some "Go follow them!" shout-outs to their friends, and many of their followers complied, so that's another way of obtaining a lot of followers in a short span of time.