Twitter needs a mute button

Posted by Michael Gaines
September 8, 2008

During this historical time of our next presidential election, I found that people I like are more than enthusiastic about their candidates. That’s fine, people have the right to say what they want, but unfortunately some spew more than others and I found my Twitter stream was filled with more about Obama, McCain, Hillary, and Palin than anything I’m actually interested in reading.

I follow politics, but I avoid the topic online. There are too many people out there who seem meek that will pounce like a tiger on you the instant you say something negative about their candidate or their party. This is not a fight I want to provoke or be a part of.

The way Twitter works is that you either follow or unfollow someone. I propose a mute button; something you can press that will remove them from your stream without actually unfollowing them. The reason why unfollowing can be seen as an unfriendly thing to do is that refollowing sends an email to the person, showing that you in fact unfollowed them at some point. Although it’s happened to me, I shrug it off. Not everyone can like my stream and that’s OK. However, some people’s egos bruise more easily and I think it would be better for the community if Twitter just put in a mechanism that quieted someone while they rant and rave about whatever it is they’re passionate about at the moment.

I realize there are third party apps like Tweetdeck, but not everyone uses it. It would be better if Twitter put this feature in at the source of their APIs rather than depending on your favorite third party app to implement it.

Social Media, Twitter

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  • Skyhawk
    Agree, I had to unfollow someone just because they were updating every single detail of their life every five minutes- ie "I'm eating a Peanut Butter Sandwich" "Now I'm drinking coffee",etc... I felt bad cause I this person follows me- but I just couldn't take it.
  • Or, maybe we could just learn to mute ourselves. Nah, nevermind.
  • Bloodwin
    I think we just need a way to filter it so that we can filter out messages with certain words or filter out certain people, either to hide them from your main stream or focus on them, you how when you want to have that chat with someone, even though twitter is a bit public for that.
  • Some friends of mine have brought out an app that emails you when you are unfollowed http://useqwitter.com/ so I guess unfollowing people is going to get a bit trickier!
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