I think there is a development opportunity here. Certainly there are analytic questions that seem interesting. Imagine a kind of slider control that could be us

I think there is a development opportunity here. Certainly there are analytic questions that seem interesting. Imagine a kind of slider control that could be used to filter out who you interact with. The slider would set the popularity threshold. You may prefer your account to interact with accounts that have roughly the same number of followers as yours, with roughly the same number of followers and the same karma. In this system, following someone is no longer a binary proposition: you follow someone at a given threshold. If your threshold is set below the number of followers of the account, you don't see their tweets, and they don't get to count you among their followers. As you move the slider, your view of Twitter changes to match the threshold: accounts you may have followed at the higher threshold drop off or become visible as you change settings. Why do this? Well, if you're a new user, you may be tired of contributing to someone else's power-law distribution. Why should you enable the rich to get richer? Why not join a system where you can interact with other users at comparable levels? Twitter is losing the Johnny-come-lately's anyway. So there is an opportunity to encourage interactions that go beyond the discouraging power-law phenomena in which a few users have most of the followers. As Satan said, "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." A follower threshold feature could enable this, and it might generate interesting analytics.