I read about the management of steemit hiring devs to add functionality into steemit. There was also some interest on how this seemingly idle functionality of (un)follow could be used, not necessarily binding it with the referral program.
Since there is some anxiety on the content produced or the ability to spot it, it maybe time to allow for personalized post feeds. Meaning, feeds that consist of all people one follows, e.g. for starters. Later on it could be possible to allow creation of multiple feeds adding people or hashtags or any other "taxonomy" to use some wordpress language.