My views are essentially these:

You Hubski feed is made up of posts from people you follow and the posts that these people share (mostly, some like kb follow strictly tags, but they are in the minority).

You feed is central to your experience, and the ability to curate it and keep it in shape is paramount to having a the highest quality experience.

We follow people for a variety of reasons...good comments, good posts, curiosity and testing the waters, collaboration, etc. But over time, we find that some people we follow can actively harm our feed, not contribute meaningfully, etc. This could be for a variety of reasons...our own interests and usage of Hubksi may have evolved away from some we follow, they may not end up posting stuff we respond too, etc.

The bottom line is that should you find yourself in a position of wanting to prune those you follow, you're met with a very large psychological barrier. The moment you do, they are alerted by a color change. It's only human for this to create an uncomfortable friction that acts against tailoring your Hubski feed. Across all social networks, I've seen this phenomena play out. It's my opinion that NOT knowing who is following you is optimal. This lets you continually curate your feed and experiment with it, without creating a psychological barrier of any sort that keeps you locked in to your existing tribe.

That being said, as mk mentioned, there is also a value to knowing who your followers are, and you'd lose that if you removed the ability to know this entirely. I think that a good compromise is to remove the color cues and still retain the ability to see all your followers on your profile page if you want to actively look them up.

Regarding user trust, -I personally think it's silly that people might think that Hubski could now secretly inflate follower counts to boost people's ego. That prospect is a non-issue for me.

So what does Hubski think? Does the knowledge that anybody you follow will be instantly alerted if you unfollow them keep you from doing it ever? Do you think your experience would be improved by this change? Do you think it's a mixed bag and you'd gain from it, but also lose the feedback that comes from instantly knowing someone is following you?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Edit: I'd still want the ability to see your total follower count no matter what. Even if it is anonymous, or if you have to go to your profile to see them. No downside to that metric staying in place that I can see. Only upside.