Exactly this. I learned this principle from a recent HN post:

The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. Markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers.

You just need to curate your timeline. You have the tools. If you timeline looks bad, you probably haven't curated it properly. If it still looks bad after curation, then perhaps it's time to take a long hard look at your friends and acquaintances!

My problem with Facebook is they actively try to make your feed controversial. You can unfriend 95% of the haters and some how that remaining 5% will fill up 50% of your feed, and it's not because they are posting more frequently.

This is ultimately why I stopped using Facebook. One day, I sat down for two hours to systematically unfriend, unfollow, and click “I don’t want to see stuff like this” on all of the memes, politics, and other crap. I’d unfollow friends who exclusively shared this stuff, and tried to train the algorithm to avoid cat videos and memes.

Something amazing happened in the middle. I started seeing engagement photos and wedding announcements and baby shower invites, from the three months prior. All things that I would have loved to know about at the time, but that were systematically suppressed in my feed because they didn’t drive as much “engagement”. For a brief moment I thought I had saved my Facebook.

But then, I refreshed my page and the tide of low quality humor, cat pictures, and political memes came back in. I remember I kept trying to tell Facebook not to show me anything from LadBible, but no matter how many times I clicked “never show me content from this page”, literally the same videos came back. A week later I came back, and the feed was again overgrown with the stuff, like poison ivy.

These feeds do not exist to inform you, they exist to keep a death grip on your attention and they cannot be redeemed. At least, I couldn’t redeem mine.

Very strange. Facebook seems to more or less honor my "never show stuff from this person/page again" clicks. Also, if you unfollow someone permanently (not for 30 days), I really doubt their posts will appear in your timeline again. Unless they arrive through pages or communities you're members of.

I agree, it seemed like a bug to me at the time, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's fixed now. To clarify, it wasn't the actual page's post that was appearing in my feed, but somebody sharing the post on that page. It's somebody who I want to follow, but I'm not interested in seeing half of the things they share. The permanent un-follow thing is legit, like you said.

Another thing I noticed was that basically the same video would be posted by a dozen (and growing) increasingly obscure pages, and my friends (and fb) would share from all the different pages indiscriminately.

If you block one obscure page, another one arrives to take its place within a few days. It almost feels engineered by design, to get around the "never show stuff from this person/page again" mechanism.

A former coworker mastered this by basically unfollowing everyone so they don't show up on her feed, then whitelisting specific things.

I couldn't be bothered... I shut it down.

I wish social networks would not automatically follow people when I connect with people.