Twitter introduces new notification settings and a tweet quality filter

There are many complaints levelled at Twitter, but two crop up time and time again. The first is that if you follow a lot of people, you're likely to be overwhelmed with notifications; the second is that there's just too much crap out there.

Twitter is introducing a couple of changes to address both of these problems with an update that's rolling out today. Arguably the more interesting of the two is the "quality filter setting".

The filter is a feature that Twitter says has been in testing for some time, but is now ready to roll out to everyone. Little detail is given about exactly how the feature works, but Twitter will use various metrics to determine the 'quality' of a tweet and then decide whether it's something worthy of appearing in your timeline.

The company says:

When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with -- and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.

In addition to the new filtering options, there's also the ability to limit notifications online and on mobile so you only see alerts about accounts you follow. Both of these features start to roll out today, so if you don’t see anything just yet, just hold tight... they'll hit your account soon.

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