[megaman821]

If you have a 1,000 people in your tech enthusiast circle, you put them there. That is a lot of work compared to people putting themselves there. A lot of the famous people on Google+ with thousands of followers post everything publicly, not even using circles.

[sanderjd]

Special semantics for the "Following" circle might be nice, where anyone you put into that circle has a "Following You" circle that you are part of. Unfortunately, I think this is probably hard to do in a manner that does not add complexity and confusion to the existing implementation. It would make sense to people from the Twitter world, but breaks the implicit assumption that your circles are private.