Ask HN: Can we add channels to Twitter, please?

Twitter seems like the perfect platform to utilize the “channel” abstraction. There are so many people we follow because we like one topic they tweet about, only to be ruined by a temporary period of heavy tweeting in another unrelated topic. Some people tweet about multiple topics like urbanism, software, and politics, so why don’t we just follow the topic of interest? Likewise, on the tweeting side, when you press tweet, it would be simple to designate a tweet to a subset of your custom channels, or just default to “all”. It would easily make the signal to noise ratio go up massively on twitter while providing increased value for tweeters and their audience. The audience no longer needs to unfollow you when you start posting pictures of food. It simply gets a new channel “food”. The tweeter no longer needs to worry about polluting their audiences feed with irrelevant tweets that puts them at risk of being unfollowed. The feed instantly gets better for all users. On twitter’s side of things, there can be less of an algorithmically selected feed and more of a user defined topical feed. Ads can be injected into feeds or channels with a higher amount of click through because it’s likely a promotion for a tweet or product in a channel or category the user has explicitly defined interest in.