Right, so, Twitter is fun. I like it. I enjoy the long-term async chat it gives me with my friends near and far, and I enjoy the amusement gained from following assorted famous people.

But.

Some of these famous people — whom I enjoy! — have a tendency to go a little bananas on the RT front, either with “real” retweets or quote-style retweets. Twitter itself will allow you to opt out of receiving a given user’s RTs at all, but this only catches the first kind; if some likes to RT posts with commentary attached, it’s not a RT by Twitter’s definition and it gets through.

The other aspect of the “disable RT” feature that makes it unsatisfactory is that it’s all or nothing, when in fact I like getting the occasional RT of some clever bit shared by someone, or the signal boost of a good cause that someone like Wheaton or Gaiman can provide.

My dream Twitter client is one that allows me to set a threshold for each person I follow (or overall; I won’t get greedy) such that I only see X tweets over Y minutes period, resetting only after the user has been quiet for Z minutes. That way, I’d get the one-off RTs and signal boosts, but I’d be spared the I MUST SHARE EVERYTHING explosions that some people (God love ’em) have been prone to.

Granted, no one is going to write this, let alone now. Something I’d settle for, though, would be the ability to apply new mutes, unfollows, or RT-blocks to the list of tweets already downloaded. That alone would salvage the experience once someone goes RT-happy.