[jdminhbg]

I tried doing the "Hide" thing for a while, but there are two problems:

1) It's a pain in the ass to hunt down and hide various people and apps, and you have to keep up with it. Consequently, your friends who are likely to say interesting things but not spend a ton of time tweaking their FB settings tend to drift off, driving your signal down.

2) Hiding people is a blunt instrument -- you hide someone who's 98% noisy but 2% interesting, and you've hidden more signal you wanted to see. Then, when they ask you about why you didn't see their baby photos, you have to tell them that the answer is because you were sick of "Which Twilight Character Are You?" and hid them.

In the end, it's easier just to quit and go back to using the regular internet.

[zacharycohn]

It took me about one week of using facebook + filtering people to get to the point where I enjoyed using facebook again. No adding people to lists, no hunting down people, nothing.

[kleevr]

Honestly I don't mind keeping FB as a Rolodex of people I may only tangentially know, but I don't necessarily want to know what they had for breakfast. Hiding totally solved this problem for me too.

[dhs]

Making use of EdgeRank gives me more control than just hiding people.

Whenever I'd like to see more of somebody, I go to their page, make a couple of comments, and pronto, their posts enter my stream, squeezing out posts of people I didn't interact with. Problem solved.

[whatusername]

Hide Applications.

Add people into lists.