In my experience, Facebook primarily shows me boring memes (probably because they get liked/shared a lot) and often buries generally interesting news (births, etc.).

By the way, I believe that some filtering might be necessary. It seems that when I joined Facebook there were far fewer memes and 'folklore' posts (we have a nice word for that in Dutch: 'tegeltjeswijsheid'). But that would be a user-trained filter, which is not interesting to Facebook.

So, I agree with both camps: we need filtering, but Facebook's filtering is rarely good, because it's not aligned with my interests.

> Facebook does a great job of giving me a quick summary of everything going on in my friends' lives

The only way you can actually know that is to compare the summary with the raw data. The only way to remain sure of it is to keep doing that.

The "raw data" in this case is my friends' lives. Based on my (off-Facebook) interactions with them I remain confident that Facebook does a good job of keeping me up to date on their lives when I use it.

i can tell you first hand that it does an awful job with my collection of facebook friends. it doesn't prioritise the people i care about most or even the things nearest to me... and more than once has absolutely polluted my feed with someone to the point i considered phoning them to explain why i was about to unfriend them.

i'm not saying your experience is untrue... just that facebook haven't done a great job of this for everyone at all.

"...summary of everything going on in my friends' lives by sorting through all the drivel algorithmically."

Sounds like you really care a lot [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1g9PFtSCKw