Right, the second thing of what you mentioned is the main problem for me - if people are going by favorite memers, it makes new stuff by unpopular users harder to get seen.
The site already seemed like it had a lot of people upvoting/viewing stuff because of the user rather than the content, and adding Followers just seems like it would make that tendency worse. Plus, I personally just don't like knowing people are following me. It seems stalkerish. Why can't people just stick with checking Latest (although I guess with the extra volume of material with all the streams now, that's hard to do).
I didn't know it was turning users egotistical, but I guess that's another problem too.