Requesting Resources Until Exhaustion
I like your code, and would use it myself, some thoughts:


I assume you declare url next to JSON.load because you want to declare it close to where you use it. I would still recommend using 1 comma separated list of variables on the top.
lowerCamelCase is good for you, get_follows -> getFollows -> getFollowedChannels ?
Comparing to 0 should be done with ===, if you do it for the length of an array I would go with a falsey comparison: if (!data || !data.follows.length) {


From a design perspective, you are circumventing the paging system, are you sure you always need every single channel? I hope you at least cache the retrieved information.