[karmacondon]

I think the biggest problem with twitter is that people follow too many other people, and the feed becomes overwhelming. It's hard to increase the signal to noise ratio because it's difficult to know in advance who will post interesting things. The only thing I know for sure is that if I unfollow someone, I will never see any of the good things they post in the future. I feel like there should be a name for this, like "The Twitterer's Dilemma"

I don't think there's a technical solution. The more people use twitter, the spammier and less interesting it will be. It's the same problem that every online community faces. More traffic almost always leads to lower quality. On the whole I think twitter serves its purpose well. Always room for new ideas though.

[FranOntanaya]

Part of the solution could be to separate connecting from subscribing. People feel they would lose some kind of social capital from unfollowing an existing connection, but would rather not see most posts from that account.

I don't put much value on Twitter's social capital so I arbitrarily stick to 150 accounts. That seems to work for me.

[SyneRyder]

You can do that already, in a way. Twitter lists provide a way to 'subscribe' to someone's tweets without actually following them and putting them in your main feed / letting them DM you. I love @SwiftOnSecurity, but she tweets too often for me to follow her, so I have her on a separate InfoSec list, together with @TroyHunt and others.

If there's someone you feel socially obligated to follow but find annoying (or they decide to go on a rant one day), you can Mute them and you'll still be following them without seeing their Tweets.

I find Twitter only works if you can be ruthless in who you unfollow. As soon as you worry that unfollowing someone will offend them, it starts to fall apart.

[hex-m]

The same could be said about the www. There is a technical solution and it's called a recommender system. It tries it's best to rate the more interesting stuff higher. That's what search engines do for the www and it kinda works.

[Spooky23]

Twitter had something called "lists" that let you categorize and segment what you follow, but they've deprecated or hidden it sufficiently that I don't use it anymore.

With the Twitter feed, I get this random spew of stuff that I can't categorize. It gets useless quickly, and I have better things to do with my time than curate twitter.

I love the basic product, but Twitter is a clueless company that needs to die so someone can replace it.

[zbuttram]

Lists are still my favorite part of Twitter, but you're right, they have it hidden away. I prefer to use Twitter clients that let me view and edit my lists easily like TweetDeck and Tweetbot. I hardly ever load up twitter.com anymore.