I think even for people who are inclined to be "authors", having space for more causal social stuff is useful. When social media works well you get to know people as people. So even if you follow someone because you think they have interesting insights about X, Y, or Z you might also be interested in little details about their life, or their thoughts about other things, or what they think is funny, etc.

I used to be active on Google+, and at one point they introduced a feature called "Collections" which were like categories that each person would create for their own content. You could subscribe to just an individual collection without following everything a person wrote, or if you followed a person you could unsubscribe from particular collections. This gave you control over what would show up in your feed, e.g. "I'm interested in what this guy has to say about video games, but I don't really care about what music he listens to". I found that it helped me feel less daunted by the "expectations" that "my audience" had for the kinds of thing I posted about. If it was far enough afield from my "normal" posts I could just create a new Collection for it and people could opt out if they wanted. That psychological difference made me feel more open about posting stuff and made it easier to post more, and feeling less straitjacketed made it more pleasant to interact with the platform.