Following users

What is the point of Follow on user's page? 

I do not interact much and therefore have few friends but there are many users whose writing/posts I like without necessarily wanting to become friends with (most of them either do not accept friend requests or do only if asked by people they'd already talked to!).  I would like to be able to see when they publish a new review etc. "Follow" does not do that. So what does it do? Just counts people?