FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
Story image
Sshh... Twitter doesn't like you
Mon, 19th May 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Last week Twitter launched a new feature that allows users to mute others, giving people the power to silence fellow tweeters without having to unfollow them.

Users can mute and unmute other users at any time, and the muted users will never know.

Much like unsubscribing from someone of Facebook, muting someone lets you stop seeing them and their annoying/offensive/stupid/whatever posts, without having to go the trouble of deleting them and potentially causing some kind of conflict.

An ‘unfollow’ is sometimes perceived as harsh in the social media world, and can cause awkward situations with mutual friends or work colleagues, but a simple mute is a silent way to keep people silent, and no one has to have a cry over it.

The feature is designed to give users more control over what pops up in their daily feeds. If someone mutes a follower, the muted user's tweets and retweets won't show up in the muter’s feed, and notifications about that user's activity will not appear.

The muted user would still be able to retweet, reply to or favourite the muter's Twitter activity, but none of that would appear in the muter's time line.

The mute button is an indication of Twitter finally offering services that allow people to personalise and clean up their newsfeeds, something they have been failing to do for some time now.

This is a step in the right direction, helping seasoned Twitter users get more out of their experience with the site.

I’m 100% for any service or product that helps block annoying/stupid (same thing really) people from bothering me, so I think this mute button is great.

It’s nothing innovative or new as far as social media goes, but it is for Twitter. So very good.