Following people is a problem here as far as I can see. In theory it's a reputation system but everyone is basically a stranger here but if you have more followers you're granted more weight. It really just makes the whole site more insular as people who've been here longer have more of a posse. If I agree with a complete idiot about one valid point on a website his opinion shouldn't be counter weighted by his general grumblings that women are inferior emotional beings. A degree of anonymity is better on the internet than everything you say being tied to a "Person" who isn't real. Everyone has something to contribute and that's what the internet is good at, just not this part of it. That's my honest opinion on this experiment without a solution. I don't like agreeing with people I'd otherwise write off as idiots but I also don't like writing off people you seem to like who are obviously naive 20 somethings who won't shut up on this website. But that is the reality I'm presented with when it's based entirely on a username system of prestige.
It's probably an artifact of the website being small. I don't have a solution but I'll probably switch to global more often or as a default. This does nothing for comments though. It's kind of an entrenched culture at this point that this website is a community and it's better for that. When it's really like 12 users or whatever who think they know each other and that's no way to grow a site. I've really not been around that long but there's like a core group that I have no interest in being a part of but dominates discussion and can tilt it towards one side when a member is seen to be affronted. If there's a conflict it's going to come down to who has more followers and I've been on the short side maybe 2-3 times. You can strive for a community atmosphere but the reality is that this is a collection of strangers with an open invitation for more strangers to join, and that invitation is the metric for success but it seems very stagnant to me at the moment as something of an outsider
As for my example above, I could do the same thing on most any site. Meaning, when I'm away from the site for a bit, I'll go directly to lil's profile to see if she has posted anything. I like her content. Right now it may seem as you mention but I think it will scale. If there were 100k users on the site, there would be many communities within the site. It's much more akin architecturally to Twitter than it is reddit.