Is Twitter Making Changes That Might Not Actually Suck?

Apparently for some time on Tweetdeck, you could “mute” people you followed. I wouldn’t know this as Tweetdeck’s layout gave me a migraine and I stopped using it. But since Twitter acquired Tweetdeck in 2011, you’d think they’d have incorporated this mute feature already, which is reportedly the most popular thing about Tweetdeck.

Well, Twitter users: wait no more.

In addition to rolling out their really awful site re-design, Twitter has been giving some of its mobile app users the option to mute people they follow, in the “block / follow / whatevs” section of a user profile. If, say, like me, you love Kurt Busiek, but occasionally (often) he gets on Twitter and tries to post a complete thought, only it takes 400 tweets and it’s 3am and literally no one else is tweeting so it sort of screws over your timeline, you can “mute” Kurt and wait until he figures out how to get a Tumblr. (Don’t do that, the Tumblr kids don’t like long-winded text posts. That’s for Blogger.)

A better example is your friend who thinks it’s a great idea to livetweet a Netflix marathon watch of Lost because they’re seeing it for the first time, like 3 years after the show went off the air. You can totally ignore that friend until they pull their head out of their ass. I suppose this feature could also be used to “follow back” people you feel obligated to, like clients or co-workers or your parents, but then to completely ignore them without their noticing. Or you could just be like me and refuse to follow back because people should know what you think of them. Stop wasting everyone’s time. You’re not that popular. Bring me some Skittles.

According to The Verge:

Tweetbot, for example, lets you mute accounts for various lengths of time — a day, a week, a month, or forever. It also lets you mute entire apps, so that (for example) you never have to see another Foursquare check-in on Twitter ever again.

See, I solved that earlier by de-friending those people. I guess you could call it the Tactless Mute. YOU’RE JUST SENDING ALL YOUR FACEBOOK STATUSES DIRECTLY TO TWITTER, CHERYL, YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW I’M NOT FOLLOWING YOU.

The Twitter mute feature is not actually a guaranteed new feature, it’s just in an “experimental” phase right now. Like maybe Twitter will decide that mute is not really for it but won’t hesitate to bring up how it “went mute” for a while there in 2014, any time it needs to impress an app that has always had mute.

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