User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Followed pages - a new way to stay up-to-date on your favorite wiki pages/@comment-1615819-20100506235454

Actually, Brandon Rhea, every user I've talked to hence-so-far has absolutely detested the feature, whether or not they've bought into Wikia features such as MyHome, or not. Every single one of them hates it, and Wikitroid is practically screaming to get rid of it. An admin who is more experienced than me says that its an intrusion of privacy and an unnecessary add-on to the watchlist; another, who uses MyHome the ShoutBox, etc, says that it "ruins the user page" for an extension that does nothing but display watchlists in public. There have been people from both experienced and unexperienced groups telling me that they want this feature off. I'm not talking a minority on my wiki, I'm talking about a majority that doesn't want it even in sight. There are so many reasons that they want this off, and so little reasons that anyone could possibly want it on that they unequivocally just want it disabled so that it won't bug others who come on the wiki. The point of all of this is to show that absolutely nobody on my wiki likes it or wants it.' This is why I want the opt-out button. To the wiki, the feature's worthless. If you can't understand that, I can't help you.

On another note: Why can't we be given an opt-in option rather than an opt-out option like Pcj said himself? The fact that you add a feature that makes public an originally-private list that was private for a good reason, and make it so that the default is to keep everything public is not only an inconvenience but a violation of that user's privacy from the very beginning. I've never heard a company violating all/most of their users' privacy until now.