In an ideal world, those things would be irrelevant @iamstan. But @steem-ua keeps asking me to get new followers :P

But having people follow and following people does mean you are less likely to miss their content.

Considering content discovery is one of the challenges here, it may be no bad thing to follow those that you wish to hear from. Specially as it means you can see what they resteem on your timeline/feed. I've often found good posts because others that I follow have resteemed them