Everyone is up in arms about "Facebook deciding what they should read," but this is only part of what's happening. There are three parts that most people don't seem to understand (and for those who do, no offense is meant, I'm just trying to explain).

1) Top news items do not replace recent news items, they just bubble to the top. If you have 10 new items, then items 2 and 9 might show up at the top if Facebook thinks they're most important. Items 1,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 10 are still right there below 2 and 9, though. In chronological order. The only valid complaint here is that items 2 and 9 are out of chronological order, not that they are somehow replacing your recent items. And, personally, I don't think this is a big deal. The vast majority of your news items are still in order, and having a post that's 6 hours old show up above one that's 2 hours old just does't seem like a big deal. Comments have to be in order, obviously, but news items are discrete entities that don't rely on ordering to make sense / be interesting.

2) Top news items are time based. If you visit the site a couple times a day, you probably won't ever see any "top news" items. When you have a reasonable amount of new items to view, Facebook simply gives them to you in "recent news" format. Try leaving Facebook up all day in a browser window; you probably won't see any top news items at all. Now, if you don't visit Facebook for a couple days, then you'll see a few top news items, but, again, all of the other items are still there, just below the top news. You still have ALL of your news items. If you want to take an hour to scroll through each and every one, you're still free to do so. Personally, though, I don't want to do that. When I ignore Facebook for a few days, I come back to hundreds of new stories. I simply don't have time to read them all. Without the "top news" feature, I would simply miss hundreds of posts. WITH the "top news" feature, I'll still miss most of them, but I probably won't miss stories about friends getting engaged, starting new jobs, etc. I think this is very helpful.

3) You can influence your top news items. Lots of people have been complaining about "I don't want no stinkin' algorithm deciding what's important" (as if they don't rely on their email spam filter to do that every day), but they need to realize that you have pretty good control over that algorithm. Each normal post can be marked as important (top left corner of the story), and each "top news" post can have its status removed (top right arrow). Facebook quickly gets very good at deciding what stuff is important to you. Particularly if you take the time to populate your "close friends" and "family" lists.

Summary

All Facebook has really done is to combine the "top news" and "recent news" into one column, instead of the two they used to have. Please see my awesome graphic below for a representation of the change.

OLD:

top news recent news
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NEW:

top news
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recent news
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Interestingly enough, people have been asking for ages to have a way for their feed to default to "recent news" instead of "top news," and now they have it (and are still complaining ). Go to Facebook a lot? You get "recent news" as default. Check once every few days? You get "top news" as default.

All seems well to me.