The Manipulators: Facebook's Social Engineering Project

As a user's FB usage grows over time, it's likely that their network of friends will grow, sometimes exponentially. What does not grow is the screen-space for the newsfeed, nor the user's ability to scroll through the increased number of updates. While it's true that some newsfeed updates get tracking because of advertising play...such as "Jon Smith Likes Candy Crush!"...that's still less annoying than, "Jon Smith scored 54304 points in Candy Crush and earned Legendary Candy Cane +1!"...which could feasibly dominate your newsfeed depending on the gameplaying habits of your friend.

Now, of course you could manually filter these things out, e.g. "Ignore all Candy Crush posts by Jon Smith" or even "Defriend Jon Smith"...but this requires manual work by the user...and if it becomes more work than leisure to enjoy one's news feed...then it's likely that FB's A/B tests have found users preferring the filtering to be automatically done, even if it lets some shit through.

Keep in mind that FB has long had the ability to create custom groups...so that you could, for example, see your feed according to people you've put in the "My university friends" group. There is even a "Close friends" group that you can manually curate, or that FB automatically fills for you. FB has basically buried the group filters...probably because users weren't actively filtering things themselves...and in terms of the "Close Friends" group...FB considered manual filtering to be redundant...after all, FB can detect how often you message/chat with another user, how long you wistfully page through their photo albums, etc. etc...if those metrics aren't key factors of the people whom you really care about...well, it's pretty damn close.

Obviously you want some sort of filter on this data. You wouldn't want a live feed of all subreddits combined. At least not for normal consumption.