This idea is quite popular among this crowd and is based on the erroneous assumption that 1) people are sufficiently educated on the subject to make anything more than a casual pass at filtering, 2) care enough to spend the mental energy needed to use these filtering tools rather than just checking out of the platform, and 3) such tools will not soon become the problem.

There is a long and unpleasant history to show that this idea is never going to work. If Facebook wants to survive as a platform they will need to undertake the unpleasant task of setting a baseline, enforcing it, and telling people who disagree to go find another platform. To be honest, I don't think Facebook as a company or its employees as individuals have the courage to save it -- it is too easy to keep cashing the checks while Rome burns...

There is a extremely successful version of this model, actually.

It's called Reddit. On Reddit, you give 1 person dictatorial power over a given community, and allow anyone to make their OWN community if they don't like the rules.

There are a multitude of examples of people not liking the rules, and forking off to form their own community.

It is the best way IMO, to give people freedom of choice to live with the rules that they prefer.

Except I consider Reddit to be yet another example of a failed online community. You can always create smaller sub-communities with dedicated dictators (Facebook calls them 'groups') but Reddit as a whole fails at this task as the history of the front page has clearly shown. I still remember back when there was just one Reddit and not sub-Reddits, and the events that led to the change. Fracturing into sub-communities is an answer only if you decide to avoid the question of community in the first place, or in the case of Reddit to re-define it into something much smaller.

The fact that these smaller communities with a narrow focus work while the larger ones fail is proof positive that tools are not the solution.

Having one super community is not going to be desirable.

And Im not talking about the internet. Im talking about groups of people in general.

Different people have different interests and it is perfectly fine for them to segregate themselves by choice into like-minded groups.

I would perhaps argue that this is the entire POINT of a community. To pick and choose who you want to interact with.

You have an odd definition of "fail" when these large communities have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users every day.

Aren't there already filters to block the user from seeing any more posts from a certain source, see less posts from that friend, unfollow friend completely, etc? I guess they could refine it into categories like politics, but that'd hit a lot of gray areas. Their strategy recently has been to de-emphasize links altogether, but that does nothing about the crappy shared posts from spam pages.

That would be even more vulnerable to abuse than the current state of affairs. State-sponsored attackers have access to essentially unlimited numbers of fake Facebook accounts -- why would you give them the ability to silence other accounts by flagging their posts?

Ask a Rohingya: filtering your own feed doesn't help when the unfiltered mob arrives to burn your house down.