Do We Need Our Fanclubs Back?

The Fan Club feature allowed people to make favorite lenses and lensmasters, thus allowing to be informed about future updates in the form of Squidcasts.

So its intended purpose seems to be to keep people together, to provide with feedback about the quality of one's own lenses (the better they are the bigger your fan club would be, supposedly), and to inform more people about lens' updates.

This seems to be the intended purpose- but what used to happen instead?
At first I did not use the feature that much. I visited, Squidliked and made favorite lensmasters-but to say that I visited each lens I got Squidcasts from would be far to exaggerated.

Then later on I tried the Squidcasts and I liked the feature- it brought a few visitors now and then. But I used it again several times and each next time the effect grew smaller and smaller. I thought I didn't make good use of the feature and didn't write good casts. At the stage when the feature was removed from Squidoo I had given it up completely. I also disliked tremendously the behavior of some people who joined my fanclub but had visited none of my lenses, had not read, liked or commented on any of them- so apparently their only intention was to make me visit and join their profile fanclub in return.

Recently I also came upon another interpretation of the Fanclub feature. It appears that "building a fanclub" equals building a "mailing list" for some of the people on Squidoo. And to some extent it really was "a list"-provided that people who joined your fanclub also received all of your Squidcasts. My only disagreement on this subject is that usually when speaking of "lists" people mean potential customers- and people who are interested in the lenses one writes not necessarily want to buy things from them.