Ingrid Lunden, Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Twitter has been on a long-term mission to overhaul have people have conversations on its platform, both to make them easier to follow and more engaging without turning toxic.

Plenty of toxic, complicated problem to fix.

That strategy is taking another big step forward this year, starting in Q1 with a new way for people to control conversations, by giving them four options to “tailor” their replies: anyone can reply, only those who a user follows can reply, only those tagged can reply, or setting a tweet to get no replies at all.

These coming changes were announced at CES. Not clear how, or when, they’ll roll out to the masses. Tricky to change the mechanics of our Twitter conversations without breaking them.

One thing I think Twitter could do is be better at spotting the bots. I regularly get new followers with names like @rpt011999275 who’ve got no posts and just joined Twitter. Inevitably, they’ve got a generic bio, something like, “Just want to bring happiness into the world.”

And then there are the bots that post strongly opinionated political messages. A bit of checking shows them for what they are. The process of uncovering these bots seems simple enough. I’d love to see Twitter to a better job bot-vetting new accounts.