What would be the purpose of "following" someone on Twitter if you don't want to read what they say? Genuinely curious; i'm not a Twitter user, but AFAIK the "following" relation there is unidirectional (i.e. you don't have to follow people that follow you).

I like to have my friends on Twitter so I can shoot them @ messages but as soon as the number of people I follow goes above around 100 the signal to noise ratio turns me off. I don't have the time or the interest to read all of that to find couple of good tweets. I'm a light Twitter user due to this; I assume creating lists can help.

If only there were any other ways of messaging people on the internet

So? Why do you even need the Internet? You could just SMS them? or why do you even need SMS? Why not just send them snail mail letters or see them in person?

There are certain pros and cons -- differeing levels of convenience being one of them -- of every communications medium and your response completely ignores that.

The person was talking about @ mentions, not DMs.

@ mentions have certain properties - it's a semi-open form of communication. Other friends who follow you both can see your communications. That can be handy

If you and others prefer to communicate (for certain purposes) via twitter, and there's another person, X, that you'd like to also include in the communication... sure you can send them a message by some other means, but it'd be more convenient to be able to just include them as well.

>The argument can be turned around - you could just follow people whose updates you don't care about on Twitter so they can message you

As I said, the discussion was not about DMs, but anyway the original point was about how software might be changed to make things more convenient... you seem to be treating less-convenient compromises as the only option that should be considered.

He's referring to Facebook-- there's a feature where you can still be friends with someone and not see anything (or just some things) they post. It's good for obsessive Farmville/Words with Friends types to hide that activity.

He refers to Facebook, but he mentions he wishes Twitter were like this, hence the question what utility would this have for Twitter.

Same as Facebook--maintain the relationship but reduce the noise. You can only DM with followers for example.

Technically, you can only DM people who follow you. Whether you follow them is irrelevant.

Twitter is a pub sub model, it doesn't really make sense to want to sub but not sub. Twitter follows aren't like friendships at all, they're a "I want to see your content" marker.

Yes but the fact that they are publicly visible makes them serve a secondary purpose.

The problem comes when you realize if you unfollowed everyone who posts unteresting stuff on facebook you would end up with an almost literally empty feed.

Empty? Don't forget about your steady diet of sponsored post.

That's not a problem, that's what you're aiming for.

I found it much easier to never sign up for Facebook. Never got past it nagging for my gmail password.

Yep, I use it a lot, actually.