[vincent-toups]

If you limit yourself merely to detecting abusive tweets, perhaps it is hard. But there are plenty of ways to adjust the way the social dynamics work that would decrease this kind of behavior but, I believe the argument goes, most of those would also decrease _engagement_.

The real problem is the incentives, both for Twitter and for people interacting on twitter. The solution is probably _social_ rather than technical, but as long as Twitter wants to keep your eyeballs on their site for as long as possible (so they can sell ads or whatever to advertisers) a whole host of solutions are going to be verboten.

By way of example, Hackernews literally has a feature to just lock you out of the site if you are using it more than you want to. That is great for us, the users. But twitter would never do such a thing.