I was reading an article about people who sign up and follow people

Well, I am not sure that I understand the question. These people are reading someone's articles and just not commenting or they sign on as followers and never read anything? I can care less if someone leaves comments on anything I have posted as long as I am getting my page views and payments.

haha, spooky?! Maybe those are devils coming out to follow people around and spook you oh! I think if you have 100 such followers in Associated Content, you would have migrated to Clout 99 now! I think those are the ones with the desire but not the confidence to write. And by joining the sites, they can subscribe to the writers, and follow the writers faithfully.

I wouldn't worry at all. I guess it could be someone who might be interested in stealing your work, but there are a lot of people who read articles and never leave comments. How do I know? I started working with a new program on Gather called SocialWrite. We get paid based on page views. I have my normal Gather pals, who come and leave comments. Then I have the vast majority of viewers (from Twitter) who never say anything...or maybe rarely one will pop up. For example, last night I wrote an article on a dog surfing competition coming up in San Diego. This morning I had 250 page views and only about 3-4 comments. And, I have begun reading articles via Twitter now that more of the things and people I am interested in are coming across my page. I never leave messages when I read a blog posting or go on another site. Just my two cents. Tell those religious people to come on over and follow me!

I think it's perfectly normal. I also do that whenever I see that the writer has a good sense of humor or is good at writing. You can't find these types of people often. But, there are also times that I'd just like to read what was written - no comment necessary. I do that too here in mylot. There are a lot of times when I only like to read what others have to say but I don't comment at all when I think that all has already been said plenty of times. As for spooky, I think it'll only be spooky when they leave something like comments that are generally referring to something personal - now that is spooky, or perhaps harassment.

Being a writer who has had brushes with plagiarism, I can understand why there are people who would be unsettled by someone who doesn't leave comments, but follows a particular group of people. There's always the fear that this someone would be follwing the articles just to copy them and paste them on a similar themed site of their own. On the other hand, it's also quite possible that this someone joined to follow a friend, discovered some other writers along the way who wrote about topics he/she was interested in, and who happens to be comment-shy.