Optimizing the news feed

I'm curious if you occasionally unblock your Facebook newsfeed to check if things have gotten better or worse. I haven't been using Facebook much until recently, but I've noticed a couple of very user-unfriendly "features" that seem to indicate that FB just doesn't care much about its public image. One is suggested posts (e.g., "Popular Across Facebook") that are hard to distinguish from posts from friends, and difficult to ad-block (due to looking just like regular posts in HTML). Another is fake instant message notifications on the mobile app whenever I "friend" someone new, that try to entice me into installing its instant messaging app (only to find out that the "notification" merely says I can now instant message that person). If I don't install the IM app, I get more and more of these fake notifications (2 from one recent "friend" and 4 from another).

Has it always been this bad or even worse in the past? Does it seem to you that FB is becoming more user-aligned, or less?

ETA: I just saw this post near the top of Hacker News, pointing out a bunch of other FB features designed to increase user engagement at the expense of their actual interests. The author seems to think the problem has gotten a lot worse over time.

I'm probably willing to give > 50% on something like: "Within 5 years, there is a Google or Facebook service that conducts detailed surveys of user preferences about what content to display and explicitly optimizes for those preferences."

The Slate article you linked to seems to suggest that Facebook already did something like that, and then backed off from it:

"Crucial as the feed quality panel has become to Facebook’s algorithm, the company has grown increasingly aware that no single source of data can tell it everything. It has responded by developing a sort of checks-and-balances system in which every news feed tweak must undergo a battery of tests among different types of audiences, and be judged on a variety of different metrics. ..."

"At each step, the company collects data on the change’s effect on metrics ranging from user engagement to time spent on the site to ad revenue to page-load time. Diagnostic tools are set up to detect an abnormally large change on any one of these crucial metrics in real time, setting off a sort of internal alarm that automatically notifies key members of the news feed team."

I think concern about public image can only push a company so far. Presumably all the complaints we're seeing isn't news to Facebook. They saw it coming or should have seen it coming years ago, and this is what they've done, which seems like the best predictor of what they'd be willing to do in the future.

If I understand correctly, what you're proposing that's different from what Facebook is already doing are 1) fully automated end-to-end machine learning optimizing only for user preferences and specifically not for engagement/ad revenue, 2) optimizing for preferences-upon-reflection instead of current preferences, and maybe 3) trying to predict and optimize for each user's individual preferences instead of using aggregate surveyed preferences (which is what it sounds like Facebook is currently doing).

1. seems unlikely because Facebook ultimately still cares mostly about engagement/ad revenue and are willing to optimize for user preference only so far as it doesn't significantly affect their bottom line. So they'll want to either maintain manual control to override user preference when needed, or not purely target user preference, or both.
2. might happen to some greater extent. But presumably there are reasons why they haven't done more in this direction already.
3. I think Facebook would be worried that doing this will make them even more vulnerable to charges of creating filter bubbles and undermining democracy, etc.