Mute Represents Everything Wrong with Twitter Today

LALALALA!
Finally, you can mute on Twitter. Everything that’s wrong with Twitter has been fixed confirmed.

If you don’t want to see what someone Tweets, unfollow them. If they are spamming with mentions, favorites or retweets, block them. If that isn’t enough, report them for spam.

But mute? The only reason Twitter needs a mute button is the platform’s addiction to reciprocity.

  • You follow me, I’ll follow you!
  • You share my content, I’ll share yours!
  • As long as you support my vanity metrics, I’ll keep supporting yours!
  • Together we’ll become the next ninja gurus!

Blech!

How Mute Works on Twitter

If you missed the announcement, mute lets you silence a user. You won’t see any of their activity, even if they mention or retweet you, but they won’t know it. Here is the announcement from Twitter. https://blog.twitter.com/2014/another-way-to-edit-your-twitter-experience-with-mute

With mute, you can follow Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki), engage with him, wait for him to follow you back, and then mute him because he Tweets too much. You will still be following and he won’t know you put him on mute. It’s like a silent unfollow, letting you keep your reciprocal followers while ensuring you completely ignore them.

Unfortunately, others see this possibility as a positive development. Here is what Mashable said about it.

“The feature will also be a boon for many businesspeople who use the service, as it allows you to pay someone you’ve networked with the courtesy of a follow on Twitter, even if you’d rather not consume the content in their Twitter stream.”

What Twitter Needs To Do Instead

We don’t need to mute users, but a temporary silence would certainly improve the Twitter experience. I’m sure a few of you would appreciate the ability to mute me during Twitter chats or conferences (and thank you to those of you that still follow me nonetheless!).

Muting certain application sources we don’t care to have cluttering our stream, such as SumAll or Paper.li, is an extremely useful feature supported by some Twitter clients, but not Twitter directly. Adding these features, rather than a blanket user mute that is already served by unfollowing or blocking, could improve the experience people have with Twitter instead of adding duplicate features.

For more information on how I use filters in Twitter, see Putting the Conversation Back Into Twitter and Beyond Lists: Use Filters to Manage Twitter.

Your Turn

What am I missing, what do you plan to use Twitter’s mute button for?

Share your view in the comments below or with me on Twitter (@wittlake). I promise, I won’t mute you.

Photo Credit: striatic via Flickr cc, edited by author.

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