Theres a lot of bots, but a lot of real people as well.
In order to get the exposure of views to your posts, steem wants you to promote it . they charge you steem dollars to promote it, which can get costly. or you can spend you steem dollars on steem power, which you already tried. steem power makes your voting power go up. but it takes a lot of steem power to become a "whale". biggest whale having an account value of several hundred thousand dollars.