Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)? Sure this might not be much of a problem on a site where you only are following a small number of people, but I find it hard to imagine it could translate to a larger site that inherently isn't just you following a few friends (i.e. Reddit).
Ye well one friend could spam alot and almost always show up in his two slots in the feed. But aslong as you have a finit number of annoying friends you could deal with that by maybe muting them from the feed or just live with it. It might be a problem since many Facebook users have 100s of "friends", but I see that as an user error. You could have a "favorite" bar with friends you easily could click on and see what they have posted. Ie. actively looking instead of a feed if the feed gets too spammy by 100s of friends.
Having absolutely equal and fair exposure would need some kind of normalized random selection of posts since last login but that would probably just get messy and confusing.
"Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)?"
Ye but atleast its deterministic, your friends find it interesting enough to talk about and the conversation can continue till it is done instead of disapearing in the feed. There could be a big cross to click to mute it.
I have no hope of having an algorithm decide what I want to see. That is my main point.
Yes we can. You could make a transparent algorithm in which eg. 15 out of 15 posts in my FB feed are from my friends in chronological order, at most two per friend. Likes etc. are just graphics and a reply from a friend bumps the post.
And something similar for Twitter.
It is not rocked science if you don't want to make the site so bad you possibly can to make visitors stay longer and see more ads when they wade through the irrelevant crap to see the post they want to see.