As most things on FB, there's been a slow march about what certain actions mean. In the case of 'likes' it's something on the order of:

"I think this is cool" -> "+ please subscribe me to your updates" -> "+ please tell everyone I know, repeatedly, that I unreservedly endorse this product/company/whatever - while not paying me anything."

You can probably detect my cynicism in the above.

You missed the part where you stop getting most of the updates from the liked company unless they pay Facebook.

Which is a natural function of an increase in the number of pages you like and the number of friends you have, an in crease in the number of pieces of content they produce and your non-increasing attention span. You will see less of content from any one source as a function of time. The source can work around this by producing more interesting content that the algorithm decides you're more likely to want to see or by paying to have their content shown to you.

If you got them all you would be aware of what you had liked but was sending you too much uninteresting stuff and you would unlike them or you could organise them to either 'get everything' or 'highlights only'.

FB's non-optional control and filtering of the feed is to benefit them and give them a monetization option, it isn't a service to you.

I could not actually say this better. +1

EdgeRank is an extortion for businesses.

The fact that people think this is reasonable really worries me.

You can disable that specific behavior at https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads&section=social, for what it's worth.

It used to be they could basically pin that to the top of a persons News Feed. They removed that ad unit, now, when you pay for an ad, you just get the social context of who likes that product. Since you are using Facebook, a platform with an explicit goal of connecting the world through sharing, it shouldn't be surprising that what you do on it will be seen by others. This social context will only show to your friends, by the way, since people who don't know me are probably not that interested in the fact that I like Topo Chico.