Do I work for Facebook, or does Facebook work for me?

Here's a thought I've been having.

One of the things that Twitter does right is it allows you to customize and subdivide your news feed. If you want to make a list of only people you actually know, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just feminist film critics, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just ginsing growers in Laos, you probably can do that (assuming that there are actually ginsing growers in Laos with twitter accounts, which would not surprise me in the slightest). Google plus has something similar, allowing you to add accounts to one or more custom-made circles that you can check independently. Facebook, though, is all or nothing. There used to be an option to set a given contact to more or less frequent appearances on your wall, but those controls seem to be removed, and instead we see what the FB sorting algorithm thinks we want to see. There are no options that I can find to create specialty lists, and the only option to affect the frequency of a particular poster appearing on your wall is to block their posts entirely, in which case, you might as well not be following them. (You also can set your FB to show most recent posts rather than top posts, but I find that it seems to reset itself frequently, and that the result is flooded by even more garbage posts from pages you liked once four years ago and forgot about)

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Facebook's algorithm is designed to serve the dual masters of telling us what our friends are doing and making money for Facebook, to the detriment of the former. In particular, the feed prioritizes high-engagement content with lots of likes and shares. Among a group of friends, this might lead to more people seeing important posts like engagement announcements and the like. When a user follows both friends and other pages, however, the balance seems to become badly skewed toward pages. It's hard for anyone I know in real life to compete with Cracked and The Lion King and Al Jazeera English for post engagement, meaning that the people I actually know and care about are buried beneath posts from national and international pages. Furthermore, even posts from popular pages are filtered by their engagement. Felicia Day has blogged about the problems this causes for her - that it incentivizes her to post things tailored for higher traffic (read: pictures of her being attractive) and makes it harder for views - artistic, social, intellectual - to compete with 'mainstream' views; in effect, Facebook becomes an enforcer of the societal status quo. And that's a problem.