To elaborate: only high value notifications activate OS notifications (i.e. your phone beeping.)
Low-value notifications simply accumulate in a separate chronological list. There would be a visual signification in the Twitter UI when you have new unseen stuff there.
This will make spam accounts that 'like' random tweets, to get people's attention, less effective.
The downside is it raises a barrier to possibly valuable new connections being made between strangers. But not a hard barrier. It'll take some extra effort for a message-recipient to engage - they need to proactively check their low-value-notifications page.
Twitter would prefer a solution that preserves a high engagement level. So I don't think they'll adopt my great idea.
Should the Twitter app on my device serve me, or Twitter Inc.? This seems like a conflict of interest!
Imagining a superior, more harmonious social networking ecosystem: separation between developers of client interfaces and message-delivering infrastructure. This is the approach Urbit is trying...
Twitter's free, ad-supported model, is not financially successful. It may not survive, whether it's disrupted by an alien computing ecosystem or not. In the course of evolving the microblogging concept, other desirable aspects may die too, like Twitter's monopoly status (and thus its near-universal reach). Maybe we'll end up with hundreds of separate networks, with varying user policies and performance qualities.