I have lots of opinions but I will save most of them for my post on the "streems" standard.

My main criticism is that I don't like the idea of forcing this data to be on the blockchain. I'm okay with optionally putting account following data on the blockchain, not necessarily for generating feeds for yourself in the client, but as a signal to let other people know who are the interesting people they think are worth following. But I think the feed definitions should ultimately be private.

Well, you could still share the feed definition if you want. In fact, maybe the feed definition could even be put into a custom JSON operation to easily share it with other people with a simple link. But it shouldn't be necessary to put it on the blockchain for steemit to provide the feed of posts/comments to the end user.

Steemit already can generate a feed of posts/comments with any of the supported sort orders for any chosen tag. Steemit could easily support doing the same except for any chosen user. The client could then merge all of these feeds into one, while filtering out redundant posts/comments as well as any satisfying some predicate on the metadata of the post/comment (author, tags, net_rshares, depth, last_update). To save network bandwidth, the actual content would not be provided in all the individual feeds (just the metadata including permlink). The client could then concurrently request from steemit.com servers the content for each post/comment that makes it into the final merged/filtered feed (and perhaps even grab it from cache if available and not invalidated).

I presume there will be follow buttons?

Do you think there will be the same follow bots that plague twitter? What are the negative implications of adding follow buttons? People are vane, there are many fake accounts on twitter, which are used for fake follow bots. Do you think its a possibility here?

I'm confused (sorry, not a techy!  just a gardener!).  Do I need to use a code to follow certain people or topics?  In future, will there just be some user-friendly buttons to click?  That would work for me :-)

Awesome! I have Followed You!

I would like see a 'like' icon do I confined podts I want to re-read without having to search for them.

Thank you for this feature!  I'm really happy to see both sides: ignore and follow.  This will make for some interesting data mining.  For example, maybe I could trust ignores made by another account (they might be exceptional at flagging disinformation for example).

It was a bit confusing to see the follower account twice so I looked into it.  It looks like `required_posting_auths` is used to track the bandwidth (does this account have enough bandwidth to post this operation) and is not necessarily the `follower`.   I see in the plugin, the `follower` must sign the operation, so obviously we don't want other people telling us who to follow.  These will probably always be the same so one signature is required.

For the operation to be valid, it looks like we need an empty array for `required_auths`...

maybe i'ts a good idea if the people can follow tags or categories too

I downvoted the post not because I disagree with the post or think it is a quality post but because I do not think that the interests of Steem are served by every platform or devteam update or request for community feedback pulling thousands of dollars from the reward pools that go to ordinary users. The reward consensus algorithm also disproportionately rewards these posts since they are the only thing that 100% of Steem users have in common (aside from being human, etc.).