Q:

Why can't you "follow" or at least "favorite" other ServerFault / StackExchange users? 

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. 

A:

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. 

A:

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

