It is REALLY easy to click the follow button. Sometimes I follow because I know I might like the content but don’t have time to dive into it immediately - but then when the person posts I don’t really ‘know’ who posts it and I skip the blog in order to curate my fav Steemians - thus never getting to know that other awesome Steemian, haha.
Fascinating stuff. Cleaning up and actually following favs is a good thing :-) Enjoy your clean timeline ;-)
I get around that since I do a lot of curating via SQL queries. I have lists on there of people I follow or who have good potential (for curie) who make great content but it's not really my thing. However, I will follow them on steemit if I like them.