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I am sure this question has been asked several times, but when I search for "favorite user" or "add user to favorites" all I seem to get is posts for favorite question of the week. Please respond with a link for me to read before just flaming me - I did try to search for my question before posting.

Why not have the ability to add people to some sort of a favorites list? I totally understand NOT wanting the ability to have any sort of private messaging system built into SuperUser/StackEx because without doubt it will end up being used to flame, threaten, spam or generally annoy others more than it would be used for thanks. However, I can think of quite a few ways you could follow a user (be able to easily view new answers, posts, comments) that are non-intrusive and non-interactive.

I also understand not wanting such a valuable resource turn into some sort of social networking site (that is what FB or any of the countless other social sites are for) - but for example I just rewarded a bounty to someone on superuser for answering a question I had posted that no one was responding to. I would like to follow this users new posts... Hmm, ok I am already seeing how this could end up turning into a issue if there was a situation where I was not happy with a reply from a user where if I were so inclined I would go and downvote all of his posts.

SO is that the reason for not having the ability to favorite users? It would just turn into a huge headache and take away from the awesomeness that is the family of stack exchange sites?

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    Oddly enough, I couldn't actually find an appropriate previous iteration of this on Meta Super User specifically. There are dozens of dupes on MSO though.
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented Aug 20, 2013 at 23:23
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    Also, if you join Chat, many users are on there, and easy to find. It's almost like its own social network on the Chat
    – Canadian Luke
    Commented Aug 21, 2013 at 0:34
  • This isn't a discussion forum. There is a chat feature to talk to other users. This isn't a social website it's a help forum to get help from "experts"
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 21, 2013 at 2:15

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This request hails from the early days of Stack Overflow, and was one of the first and most frequent feature requests to be declined.

The official reference thread is A "friends list" on Stack Overflow would be nice on Meta Stack Overflow.

What it essentially comes down to is what you've said - Stack Exchange isn't a social networking site. We don't want to be. The focus has always been on the content of the questions and the answers, not who's posting them. Following individuals would go against that concept. We don't want to encourage cult followings, we want to encourage high-quality content regardless of who wrote it.

You can subscribe to a specific RSS feed for each user, so if you really want to follow a user's contributions, you could do it that way. The format is https://superuser.com/feeds/user/userID. Yours is https://superuser.com/feeds/user/54785, for example.

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