This is just a question out of curiosity. Is there any actual benefit to following someone or is it more of a "hey, you followed me, cool, now you can get on with life"?
Eh, I use(d? ish) mine so that I can easily find a few members. Its more intentional feature is that you can view things that they've done recently on a "news feed" (located on your username dropdown menu in the upper right).
It can do a few things. You can set your profile or individual blog posts to be visible only to people you follow, so it can act like a whitelist for those. That's it aside from the news feed and friends list type functionality that Kitti just ninja'd me with.