You can make a clean chronological feed quite easily with the API (the API does not include sponsored content, suggested topics or suggested likes and replies, but I want none of that anyway), this is how I have consumed twitter for years. I have filters on top of it, but those are decided my me and not their algorithms.
Have been thinking about polishing and releasing the service, but I'm not sure it is a convenience people would actually pay for?
I know, but making it paid would mean that I'd never have more than O(1000) users (optimistically!), and I doubt twitter would care. My main question is whether users would.
Something like that for YouTube would be nice also, I miss so many videos from channels I'm subscribed to because they don't show everything in your New feed. I would gladly pay $12/year for a service that does that and maybe a few other obviously useful features (tagging, attaching private comments, subscribing to friends public archives, etc).
Yes...tagging for grouping, notes for annotating, etc. There's also massive opportunity for crowd sourcing of topic based discovery.
The YouTube platform is amazingly horrible (from an end user perspective) considering how valuable its content is, if you could implement something that can't be blocked somehow I think it could be a financially rewarding little business, there are lots of heavy users of YouTube.
Have been thinking about polishing and releasing the service, but I'm not sure it is a convenience people would actually pay for?