Twitter could be about to eliminate the clutter in your feed by replacing trending topics with talking points you're actually interested in. The news arrives via Mashable, which reports that the new experiment has been designed to make the social media platform more welcoming.

The change will allow users to follow topics of interest in the same way as they follow users. This would mean that your Twitter feed would be built from topics you've actively chosen to engage with and lessens the need to dig through the platform's Explore tab. It will pull relevant tweets and put them in your feed regardless of whether you follow the account that posted it. It will also allow you to mute topics and conversations.

Twitter will start testing its "interests" function with Android users on sports-related topics. If successful, the rollout would see topics curated by Twitter staff, with the hope that it will stop users seeing hateful or harmful tweets. The content on each chosen topic will be pulled automatically regardless of specific hashtags or words.

During a briefing yesterday, Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour explained, "Just as over the last 13 years you've been able to follow accounts or mute accounts, we want to allow our customers to follow topics and mute topics. You may decide to turn off politics for the day and only look at puppy Twitter."