A million times this. Curate your feed for content ('like' good pages) and hide those 'friends' you're not interested in.
What other place can you chat easily with friends far away, find a last minute ticket for a concert from someone who has an online identity without paying scalper prices, find out an old friend moved to your area, keep in touch with the masses who connect with you for other reasons (e.g. I run a music community and chat with users on Facebook sometimes), and the list goes on. Show me more ads, I don't care! They're not horrible popups and the News Feed ones are only somewhat intrusive.
Why in the world would I want to do this? I eventually gave up on Facebook because I spent more time "curating" it than using it, and the end result was awkward conversations with friends who assumed I had seen something when in fact I was no longer subscribed to their baby pictures.
> What other place can you ...
Mostly email, iMessage/SMS/BBM/WhatsApp, and Twitter.
I don't have 1000 friends on Facebook, it's pretty easy to curate 200-300 friends. It takes a few seconds to remove someone from your feed.
>iMessage/SMS/BBM/WhatsApp, and Twitter.
Very few of my friends use Twitter and I can't easily drop links and have long, fast conversations with people. Facebook chat integrates with the private messages seamlessly. It's a much better experience than texting (how can I easily send many links) or sending 140 characters or less.
What other place can you chat easily with friends far away, find a last minute ticket for a concert from someone who has an online identity without paying scalper prices, find out an old friend moved to your area, keep in touch with the masses who connect with you for other reasons (e.g. I run a music community and chat with users on Facebook sometimes), and the list goes on. Show me more ads, I don't care! They're not horrible popups and the News Feed ones are only somewhat intrusive.