Greg,
You haven't grasped it yet: Adobe doesn't care a hoot about the forums. The top executives probably don't even know they exist.
Adobe has become an amorphous, elephantine, unresponsive bureaucracy, run by corporate executives who don't know the products at all.
The people in charge obviously want to kill the forums by attrition, and if they can avoid the PR debacle of simple shutting them down, so much the better.
The forums are not even a shadow of their former selves and the most valuable contributors have been leaving—or forced to leave—for years. This is not a recent development, but a slow, inexorable decay.
As far as following threads or forums, you don't have to do it intentionally. Just reading them or looking in makes you a "follower" behind the scenes,