A weird aspect of having a lot of followers who don't necessarily interact with you is how often you realize you criticized their work without realizing they'd see it, then hope you didn't come off sounding too dismissive or aggressive about it.
Yea, that's exactly the reason I worry about "flattening." In addition, if social aspects induce too much filtering, its not so much a chilling effect as it is a shift in information content towards social navigation rather than "what I'm trying to say."