The Twitter Mute Button
From the 2015 archives The Twitter Mute Button What does it really Say
On May 12, 2014, Product Manager Paul Rosania posted “Another Way to edit your Twitter experience: with mute”
I have a few thoughts on the announcement shown below.
Paul Rosania stated
“Today we’re beginning to introduce a new account feature called mute to people who use our iPhone and Android apps and twitter.com. Mute gives you even more control over the content you see on Twitter by letting you remove a user’s content from key parts of your Twitter experience.”
I, James, state
By using the words introduce, feature, more control, and Twitter experience it gives the impression it is certainly needed. In the next paragraph I come to the conclusion of why it was introduced, and IMHO it is more than what is stated in the paragraph. Read on.
Paul Rosania stated further
In the same way you can turn on device notifications so you never miss a Tweet from your favorite users, you can now mute users you’d like to hear from less. Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user. The muted user will still be able to favorite, reply to and retweet your Tweets; you just won’t see any of that activity in your timeline. The muted user will not know that you’ve muted him/her, and of course you can unmute at any time.
James stats further
What Paul stated in a nutshell, all be it an upbeat manner, is you can keep the muted person following you in addition to seeing your Twitter messages while you ignore their messages.
“Why not just unfollow them,” I quipped to myself? Then the following thoughts came to me.
● Twitter is now an IPO \ stock market commodity. It’s a numbers game more than ever.
● Maybe we can help stop people from unfollowing one another. One Twitter app user can have thousands of people they follow, this in return has a reciprocation effect, but in reality the user is only viewing a few hundred of its followers’ Twitter messages in his or her time feed line.
● Some may say, “I don’t want to be rude or hurt the person’s feelings for unfollowing them.
To each his\her own, however, here is something to think about.
How do you feel when someone wastes your time?
Are you a person who would appreciate having a person be straight with you?
For the teenage readers here, a word to the wise; social media is a tool of communication, however, muting a person with no intention to ever unmute them is in some mature circles rude or inconsiderate. This is what I think will happen in the short and long run with this mute feature. People will set it and forget it.
FYI – The Twitter Private and Public Lists feature is one way to focus on a core group of people. Periodically as you happen to view your Twitter timeline you can add and take away from the list
I wonder if someone will create an app that will inform you possibly of being muted and by who?
As for me, I desire for people to feel free to unfollow me knowing I will move on to the next person of interest. Because the several hundred I am following now know that if I greet them in peace, then it is only proper etiquette, professional and otherwise human relations to respond. This includes sporadically seeing my tweets in their time line. It is one thing to miss Twitter time line messages because no one can read them all in large numbers; it is another to not even give my Twitter message an opportunity to at least reach your eye’s attention.
So if ignored, thank you for at least making it obvious so I can now unfollow if I have no further interest either. This way I will not waste your valuable time and you will not waste mine. The mute button will provide a false hope in some people that a person they are interested in may catch a profound thought from them. Yet, in reality, they muted you 1 second after they followed you. As some young people can express with flare: “Yea, it’s all about the numbers baby!”
Inasmuch, if you like or don’t mind having a high number of follow\followers who some of them will not respond to a greeting and probably muting you in the same vein, then the instructions are provided below.
Instructions on how to use the Twitter Mute feature
To mute a user from a Tweet on your iOS or Android device or on Twitter for web, tap more and then mute @username. To mute someone from his/her profile page, tap the gear icon on the page and choose mute @username.