Hmm. I think I get dieketzers point with the follow function. There should be an option available to the user to moderate who follows them and also the ability to take some one out of the followers list. There definitely may come a time, when the association with a certain user isn't wanted and I believe, at the moment, there is no way to stop the association in Xen.
On the other hand, I disagree with the criticism of "an authoritarian approach", because simply, it is that way. An admin is and must be authoritive in a forum. He is the boss and must rule over the forum. If he or she doesn't do it, then someone else must, otherwise, the necessary discipline needed to keep the forum orderly will be missing. A forum must have rules, they must be fair, the users must obide by them and if they don't, the admin must react with certain concequence. Judgement is part of that reaction. There is no way to avoid that and just giving users an ignore function, although useful, will not truely solve unruly users being very annoying and disruptive. At some point the admin must be authorative and take action.
/edit - thinking further on this. It would be nice, once there was an ignore function in Xen, for the admin to see some statistics on who has been ignored how much recently. On a big forum that could be useful for the admin to pinpoint troublesome users fast.
xenDach