This has been something requested in a few different ways but not generally as you have put it so i will just mention a few of the things i have always had problems with.
To give you a bit of an example: I am an emote approver for BetterTTV, if i go into a channel to let them know that their emote has been approved or i saw them tweet about their emotes on twitter if i see myself get timed out immediately or randomly i’ll most likely just leave. I don’t follow the channels i am just going into to inform them of things, but if this mode was active then i would be timed out in every single channel i went into for it.
If someone wants to troll being forced to press the follow button isn’t a way to stop them and if someone really wants to troll or cause an issue they will find a method to do so. Following is free and it would take no time for bots and trolls to follow before they do anything.
This stops almost all twitch raids. If someone raids you they might be following you but likely a large part of their community won’t be
Personally, this feature just sort of lends itself to a hostile environment of being forced to do certain things to do such a basic part of twitch which is chatting.
I agree for smaller streams it doesn’t make much sense, but I often watch a big streamer ~25k every Friday. And here and now he is getting really annoyed by some viewers and I checked it the last few streams, they are almost always non-followers (95%) and I took samples from normal non-banned people, which are usually followers.
It may prevent Twitch raids, but that is not necessary a bad thing…
I’m working on a small bot for that purpose myself, but I thoight that nightbot developers were more competent than me for sth like this.