The last year or so I was on Facebook I had basically hidden or otherwise removed anything that wasn't posted by a friend directly. It would take me around five minutes or less to scroll through everything once a week.

The problem is that if Facebook implemented this site wide engagement would drop dramatically. No one really posts to Facebook anymore, people love it when you do, because it's actually kinda novel.

I've started doing that, but the problem is facebook will prefer to hide thing my friends are doing and showing me more of the garbage others are sharing. Hiding everything someone shares makes things better, but I've been doing that for a month and still see tons of posts that people have shared. (some people share 40 things per day, they need to get a life)

Facebook doesn't actually hide things when you make them show none from X. I see many of those things after I hide all them.

FBPurity is a browser plugin that lets you hide the junk you don't want to see on FB, set the newsfeed to chronological. I have mine set to only show what my friends post, but not the things they like or share or comment on.

This would make them hugely less profitable, and therefore would never happen.

but, as the post points out, you get lots of stuff people don't like (like group posts, or people abusing public figures, or arguments)

so whilst in theory it sounds good, in practice, not so much