As a Facebook user if a friend encounters racism I'd like to see the link to blog post about it as well. If a friend is performing in a concert I'd like to see the link to the concert program. If a friend writes a news article or is in the news I'd like to see it as well. If a friend launches a startup I'd like to know. I often don't see these things because they're links.

I'm referring mostly to friends' content only. Decreased external links from non-friends is fine, but I'd like to see everything from friends and what they're upto, and in whatever form they want to share it in. That's why they are friends.

Sounds to me like filtering for the dashboard would make more sense? Give users the ability to filter through content types instead of trying to cram through 5 thousand friends streams of content.