I Have a Few Suggestions

I have two great ideas for Facebook upgrades.

First, I think they should add a regular expression filter to automatically block all mention of terms in a user-defined list of keywords and phrases. For example, I might blacklist all posts containing the phrases ice bucket challenge or Robin Williams, because, as great as they may be, I'm sick of hearing about them. Feel free to judge me a curmudgeon, but you're the ones who played them out inside of a week. Meanwhile, you might choose to block phrases such as Ferguson, Islamic State, Gaza, and Ukraine. All's fair in love, war, and self-righteous indignation.

Next, they should add a "No, really, I mean it!" checkbox. When you made a status update you actually cared about, you could tick this box, and Facebook would then flag your post as something you think people should actually read, as opposed to the usual trifles, viral marketing fads, and political platitudes and misinformation scrawled in bold fonts across jpegs. Rather than resorting to blocking or unfollowing people outright, users could instead opt to have Facebook show only things This_User really cares about. Perhaps you have a friend who is constantly worked up about pretty much everything and flags every other post as important. For this person you might instead select an option do not show me things This_User really cares about, so as to keep the discussion focused on the evening's dinner and the latest funny videos of cats doing stuff. Good fences make for good neighbors.

I feel the implementation of these two features would go a long way toward making me not want to not visit Facebook ever again, even though I do visit Facebook all the time and hate myself a little for doing so.