Yes I realize that my dumbass friends are posting all these meme's and pictures. But what I want facebook to do is show me their status updates and other meaningful things other than the "Don't worry be happy" meme that shows up on my feed. The problem is that I get all this junk from them and have no way of turning off that part of it and keeping the other part. Not an unreasonable feature request IMO. I would love a text-based facebook feed. Like a twitter within facebook - one where I see all my friends status/profile updates to begin with..

Facebook's algorithms prioritize picture uploads over and above status updates. If you've been a long time Facebook user you'll see how now you see way more picture posts as opposed to status updates (just check the occurrences on your feed..) In fact, it appears that picture based posts are prioritized. So a picture post of a cat/anything-else will have a higher probability of showing up on your feed as opposed to "YAY We're getting married!" (unless that status update has a lot of likes.. etc..)

What I meant in my initial post was that facebook's news feed algorithm is changing and the end result will naturally be quite different from what it started out as. As this algorithm evolves to keep investors happy and ad revenues up, things will change considerably. If that pisses users off, then another social network might be able to fill in/take over. As an example, Path has had plenty of success so far - not a facebook killer but in a nice niche..