for distinguishing between friends and reciprocal following. I've unfollowed people on scuttlebutt already not because I don't like them, but because I preferred not to see updates from a few of the people they were following.

In the end, I still saw updates from the person I unfolllowed, because we had mutual friends, but not the problematic individuals. I see follow/unfollow less as an expression of friendship, and more a means of manipulating the structure of the social graph for better curation.

This paper explores the psychological effects of "unfriending" on facebook, but I'm not sure there have been any studies on similar systems where a word other than "friend" was applied to the relationship.