That's kind of the rub with twitter, it puts individuals front and center... and individuals presumably have more than one interest that they might want to talk about. I mainly use twitter to surface fanart and some communities are very organized with using the right #tags, and when I check those tags I have a 100% hit rate on finding something new that I want to see. But anything else on that site is a crapshoot. It's kind of twitter's normal culture to be disorganized, but I'm pretty sure I and everyone I interact with on twitter are actually tumblr refugees and we're very diligent with tagging.

You're really better off with traditional thread-based forums to have conversation topics. Muting somebody's entire existence just because they occasionally dirty the general feed with 'offtopic' just doesn't seem like a sustainable way to use social media.

It has worked well for many years, at least for me. More people than you might expect really do focus an account on one topic. Some people have multiple accounts to separate work/personal life as well.

It’s nothing personal for me not to follow someone, so I don’t really see it as muting their whole existence.

> I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different topics you could subscribe (or not) to.

All services would be better if they were more like Google+ (but didn't share name with a despised effort to crush pseudonyms and wasn't owned by a company that buried it as soon as they had been forced to iron out the wrinkles ;-)

I suspect that the complexity tradeoff isn't worth it for them. As in it would solve the problem but probably send overall engagement down.

Opt in would be nice, I am sure high follower people would rather go to the effort of categorising their tweets rather than losing followers when they decide to Tweet about their local sports.