But I have only several hundred friends on Facebook. The number grows slowly now, and that's natural for user in my demographic. With that number of friends, having my News Feed swamped by volume is not a concern. What's more important to me is not inadvertently missing something posted by a friend. If I depend on Facebook to edit my News Feed, I run that risk. Here's how I prevent that from happening.
Facebook provides two useful tools: Most Recent and Close Friends. Most Recent is an alternative to the News Feed. Whether you use Facebook from a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone, you can set your client to show the Most Recent feed. This gives you a chronological sequence of items posted by your friends. Toggle between Most Recent and News Feed; you'll see the difference.
My other trick is to mark nearly every friend a Close Friend. This takes effort because you must make the Close Friend selection one friend at a time. But once you've done that, you merely have to remember to do it whenever you befriend a new person. Again, regardless of what software you access Facebook with, you can select the Close Friends feed as an alternative.
Usually I keep Most Recent as my primary feed and look at Close Friends (and my Family feed) once daily. I believe that thereby I see nearly everything posted by my friends. And if you have a Friend who posts too much but whom you do not wish to defriend, simply hide him or her from the Most Recent feed. Their items will still appear in the Close Friends feed.
As for Facebook's Follow feature, I don't use it. Instead I follow someone on Twitter, or I use the RSS feed from a blogsite if available. Feedly has proved to be a very helpful replacement for Google Reader. I recommend Feedly.