I don't see this as creepy at all. A lot of people posting here are smart folks with interesting ideas and unique insights, and I can see where a lot of people

I don't see this as creepy at all. A lot of people posting here are smart folks with interesting ideas and unique insights, and I can see where a lot of people would want to "follow" certainly the more well-known and influential figures here. You should know that anything you post here is public anyway, and HN makes it easy to get a digest of your comments anyway via your profile page. This is just an attempt to make the process easier - you save time by being alerted to comments rather than periodically checking for them. Besides, reddit does something very similar already: reddit users can "friend" each other to highlight posts from people they like, and reddit user pages are rss-enabled. To my knowledge, there has been no backlash over this.