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I may get flamed for asking, but I've always wondered..

Why don't the StackExchnge sites have any mechanism for “making friends", or at least keeping track of people you like, find interesting, want to harass, etc. ?

I often click through to the account profiles of people who I have seen answer questions with particular insight or uncommon knowledge - to see what other topics they have posted on, etc. There is, however, no way to keep tabs on these people. Unless I bookmark their particular page, I'm unlikely to happen upon it again.

For an ecosystem that depends so heavily on people's willingness to interact with each other, this seems like a pretty antisocial omission.

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  • A workaround: you can set his network-wide activity as bookmark or as your browser start page, although I find this type of love a little bit... uncommon :-)
    – peterh
    Commented Apr 19, 2017 at 2:25

3 Answers 3

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The focus of the system must be on Q&A, not users and questions/answers.

This is the similar question as Is it possible to follow a user automatically? on meta.stackoverflow.com. The top level answers are:

  • You can follow their RSS feed: example
  • Quoted from Jeff's blog:

    We’re not building some hyper-viral social networking tool like Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn where we try to game you into hanging around and socializing and building lists of fake friends to get results

So in summary, no there is no way, and it is by design.

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This is not a social network, it's a technical one. One of the very good reasons for not implementing such a feature is your very own example of

want to harass, etc

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I often click through to the account profiles of people who I have seen answer questions with particular insight or uncommon knowledge - to see what other topics they have posted on, etc. There is, however, no way to keep tabs on these people. Unless I bookmark their particular page, I'm unlikely to happen upon it again.

I don't understand what your goal is -- all the profiles are public, so if you find someone who you feel is knowledgable, then simply browse through all the answers and questions on their profile.

There is also an RSS feed on each user's page if you wish to add that to your feed reader.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

(and yes, we are building a social network for the anti-social, thanks for asking!)

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