[danso]

In an ideal world, yes. But I suspect even the most particular Facebook users have FB-friended people who turn out to have a much more annoying online persona, i.e. anyone who hasn't grokked what oversharing on the Internet means.

In cases where de-friending a person has no real-life consequences (i.e. they're not a close friend, either in proximity or emotionally), then FB's curation saves you a little of that tedious cleanup. In cases where it is awkward to defriend someone because you have a real-life connection to them, the curation may save you from having to manually silence their updates.

I can only think of one case where I had to manually perform these silencing actions, and it was with a friend who is a good real life friend and who I communicate on FB regularly, but who has decided to make his wall a constant stream of his political beliefs. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with the convenience that FB's curation performs in auto-ignoring the people that I tend to ignore (but not necessarily dislike).

There's one more important aspect to this. Sometimes, a FB friend who isn't normally in your Top feed will appear because something he/she posted has gotten a lot of activity/likes. This is not so dissimilar to a place like HN, where the well-liked submissions of people I've never met are prominently visible to me. This kind of social aggregation would not happen in a situation where you've decided to shut out all people that you've decided a priori have and will have nothing of interest to you.