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> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics.

This is the biggest reason I end up unfollowing people.

Say I follow a person because they post interesting technical articles. Over time (as their follower count increases, usually...) they drift toward making 80% political posts and only 20% technical. I'd still like to see their technical posts w/o having to sift through all the political posts. Usually I just end up unfollowing, depending on how bad it gets, but I wish I could still see and participate in their topics I care about.

This is true even in real-life relationships. There are some people you just don't discuss certain topics with.

I don't discuss politics or medicine with my in-laws. I don't discuss religion anymore with my cousin. Or history with my grandfather. I avoid talking about money with my brother. Why? Because over time I've realized there's nothing to be gained from participating in a conversation with them on that particular topic.

I found the same thing happening to me all the time. I follow software devs, writers, etc. because I am interested in what they do not whatever politics they go on about like everyone else. What I found helped a lot was twitter's mute words functionality, so I just muted words like Trump etc. and it cleaned up my feed a LOT. Much more enjoyable experience now.

> Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition, vs reactively shutting them down.

I think the problem with this approach is that it assumes that typical users like you and me, not bots or people with a particular agenda or goal (i.e. brigading) are the primary sources of abuse.

Unfortunately I think it's much more likely to be the latter section of highly motivated users or bots that are responsible for a disproportion volume of abuse, and there's little incentive Twitter can create to motivate them otherwise

I have found that with social media in general it has never mapped to my interactions in person. I have friends I talk politics with, friends I talk sports with, friends I talk music, and etc. Sometimes they overlap, but almost never in totality. Social media gives me people in total, because I don't think people have really learned how to curate themselves, or really understand how the signal broadcasts. Everyone is learning by trial and error, and I don't think we are learning the right things yet.

> I want to read about politics from the political analysts I follow, but don't care about their cooking adventures on the weekend. I want to read about tech from the software folks I follow, but don't want to hear about their politics. I sure as heck don't want to see "liked" tweets by people I follow in areas outside of the interests of theirs I care about. > Beyond that, I'm generally disappointed that we never hear about features that try to get users to act better, by their own volition

Now that's a great idea. Let me create multiple outgoing feeds. Lists become 10x cooler when "C programming" only contains programming tweets

I just can't get value out of Twitter, for this very reason. I know you can use any social network for any purpose, but for me, Facebook has always been about following friends and family, and I enjoy the content. Twitter has always been pushed as a way to be "in the know", but no matter how hard I try to 'curate' my feed, I find that following people who I don't personally know means that most of the tweets I see are worse than meaningless, they have negative value. So my entire feed ends up being either ads, or content I don't want to hear about from the people I follow for other reasons.