Did Fark have anything beyond Fark and Total Fark that would affect filtering via account subscribe/follow links? I seem to be it being a straight weblog stream. Slashdot had a following->newsfeed feature for things like blog stories, but I don't recall that it ever really got a ton of use (or maybe that was just me).

If your social circle (especially friends-of-friends) is large enough, then IMO there isn't much of a difference. On any given day I might have 1200x400 different users and posts available to me, and the FB algorithm has to sort them somehow, even before getting to the "out of the blue" or paid microtargetting ads it wants to show. If someone wants to manipulate your perceptive worldview, they can do it using existing opt-ins with the amount of metadata they've got.