Part of the Facebook problem is that they mostly took control of the feed away from users. They now surface the more "engaging" posts at the top and more frequently. This leads to the overemphasis of viral images and videos. If you post a simple personal status message without an image and Facebook's sentiment analysis considers it to be non-engaging many of your friends won't even see it as Facebook will favor marketing spam over your actual personal post. Users also become trained over time by the number of likes they receive to tailor their posts to conform to Facebook's whims.

Easy: Stop littering the feed with pictures, videos and articles. Exclude them altogether or show them very rarely. You can also easily identify "viral" content that doesn't belong to the user and remove it. Eventually they'll learn not to waste their time posting those things because they'll get no responses. And if someone posts an article, leave it as a plain old text link instead of creating a massive preview of the article (complete with title, picture, lede, etc.).

Facebook does the opposite now, which leads people to use it as a content consumption platform rather than a social network. Obviously that's what Facebook wants, since content consumption is infinitely more profitable than people posting on each other's walls all day.

Allow people to tag their posts, and have friends who tag their posts. Then have an option to not see posts of type X (link, photo, text, video, audio) tagged with Y by contact Z. Have further options to display little icons with some info for hidden posts to easily expand them inline. And so on.

Yes, you'd have to manually curate some things, but otherwise I think it's mostly just a matter of not hiring any marketing people, and creating the features first and looking how to make them easily usable second. Especially if the goal isn't to "kill FB", but simply offer an alternative to those who want the good bits and actually like, uhh, reading manuals and being proficient with the tools they use.

They can't come if there is nowhere for them to come to, and then it's easy to pretend they don't exist. But they do, even among the old and young and not so technical.

UI can help with that. If there wasn't a share button or URL previews, the percentage of original content would be greater.

AI can help with that. Facebook already has automatic alt text for images, for example:

* Image may contain: 1 person, standing, selfie and phone

* Image may contain: cat

* Image may contain: food

And for an end-user, simple filtering can help with that. I sometimes use the FBPurity browser extension to hide everything that's a link or shared post, leaving almost exclusively original content. It can filter on that automatic alt text too if you hate cats, but I don't mind frivolous posts that are original content from my actual friends.

You'd only let people in with a .edu email and marketing as a hookup app

Remove the like, and let the feed be the actual feed and not an algorithmically-filtered list, would be a great start IMHO.

You'd get most of the way there by making it possible not to see things your friends have shared.