Don't friend people on Facebook who post garbage. Any social service (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is only as good as the effort you put into curating the experience.

Oh, and if you feel you must friend someone, you can just hide everything they post from your news feed.

Or do you expect everyone you know to be excellent, always-interesting, content curators?

It would be like subscribing to political blogs on $rssApp and then leaving bad ratings for the app because your news stream is filled with political news.

Facebook's tools have been pretty good so far from blocking spam from friends. Games (the main offenders) can be outright hidden or blocked, noisy or shitposting friends can be turned down to manageable levels (updates -> only important) or hidden outright.

Really the best thing they could add for flexibility is a keyword filter...

So i'll say it again. You, the user, is ultimately responsible for what comes up in your stream.

I friend people based on how well I know them and wanting to keep in touch, not how interesting their facebook posts are. Sure, I don't really care about all the mundane things my friends' kids do every day, but it's nice to know what people are up to in general. That doesn't mean the stream is irrelevant or useless to me, but it also doesn't mean I need to see it every time I turn on my phone.

It appears you are viewing Facebook as some kind of alternative to Google+, or as a news feed where you can 'subscribe to interesting people' or something like that. That's one way of using Facebook, but I'd estimate the vast majority of people use it more like a network of friends, relatives, close or distant acquaintances, famous people/companies/products you they like, etc. The idea behind Facebook Home is to put information originating from this network in your face, all the time. Just saying you should simply block updates from anyone who isn't interesting enough to randomly show up on your home screen, kind of defeats the purpose of the feature.

If I have the "wrong friends" for a product to be useful to me, then I would probably not rate it highly.

I think this is a very outdated and anti-user way to approach the Facebook service, and I hope your idea of how these services work will be overthrown by better startups or a better Facebook.

I see it as simply:

* A failure of Facebook to figure out what I like seeing, which is shocking seeing as I literally "Like" the things I like seeing!

* A failure of Facebook to categorize input properly at the time of input.

If Facebook properly understood input, and properly understood what I like seeing, then "curation" wouldn't be an issue.

In light of those user experience failures on the part of Facebook, your opinion is "curate it yourself" but my opinion is "Facebook has failed when I curate it myself".

If I want to curate it myself, I won't use a walled garden feed system like Facebook...

I'd prefer to be able to say things like, "Show me photos that X posts, but don't show me any of the web links that X posts".

But, I'm just dreaming now.

Google Now has the most useful approach here, and I'm eager to see that developed even further. If you could populate it with selected RSS feeds, that would be nice.

This way essentially Flipboard-formatted RSS becomes your screen saver.

http://blog.htc.com/2013/03/htc-one-blinkfeed/

Did you really expect prolific and intense discussion? This is Facebook we're talking about here...

If there were an HN Home I would download it without even thinking.

Facebook seems to be a crazy mix of "share and like and win" advertising, "share and like and win" like farming, floods of bait advertising from games, and any other number of bizarre scams their users get mixed up in.

Reader?

I mean, if someone created a full lockscreen/homescreen replacement around the idea of my feeds and my content with the same polish and quality that Facebook did, that that would be my killer app.