Take control of your FB News Feed and Notifications

For all FB's privacy and notification shortcomings, at least they make it quite easy and consistent to get rid of things you don't like. Most of the time, there are options to hide it on the right.

News Feed

You can hide all posts by a page. This means you can like a page, but not have its posts show up in your News Feed. I do this to support pages, but whose posts don't concern me (e.g. Commonwealth Bank Australia).

To turn them back on, click on the pencil to the left of News Feed (on the left of your screen) then Edit Settings.

Notifications

Similarly, you can easily turn of notifications from apps. This works great when you comment on someone's status, and they proceed to have a conversation with someone else on that post, and you keep getting notified.