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Ask HN: How would you improve Twitter?

4 points by lj3 ↗ HN
If you had the power to change, add or remove anything from twitter, what would it be?

7 comments

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selllikesybok
Remove abusive, awful users from the service?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
selllikesybok
Heh. Of course, never that.

Curious to hear why instituting a heavier-handed DBAD policy would not improve... well, every business/venue/experience?

J_Darnley
Anything, you say. Can I remove it all and shut it down completely?
r721
I would invest more development resources into natural language processing, for example:

1. Calculate "abusiveness score" of a tweet

2. Calculate "profanity score" of a tweet (I believe that's a different thing from 1.)

3. Allow users to set thresholds for these scores in settings

4. Use these scores for sorting replies (optionally?)

5. Google News-like clustering of news stories, and then tweets linking to them without adding original text

6. Automatic summarization of news stories

lj3 

    3. Allow users to set thresholds for these scores in settings
Brilliant. You could have a slider for each of those things in the setting area, along with an example 'worst scenario' tweet that would be allowed with the settings you chose.

    Use these scores for sorting replies (optionally?)
Didn't facebook get heat for attempting to do that? I'm one of those anal retentive people who want so see everything in chronological order, but I may be in the minority there.

    .... news
I'm not sure if automatic summarization is possible, but it shouldn't be difficult to auto-tag tweets by news story and let users filter them out of their primary timeline and into a separate list. Or just ignore them completely.