You Can Now Mute People on Twitter
Twitter just got a little bit more passive-aggressive.
On Monday afternoon, Twitter announced that it’s rolling out a “mute” feature. The update will allow you to temporarily eliminate a person from your feed so that you will no longer see her tweets in your timeline or receive push or SMS notifications from her on your phone.
Though the mutee is still able to fave, retweet, and reply to your tweets for anyone else to see, those notifications won’t show up in your timeline either. And here’s the sneaky part: The person you decide to ignore will have no idea she’s been muted.
This update is part of a steady stream of changes Twitter has implemented in a recent attempt to make its service more appealing to a wider audience. Others include more image-heavy profile pages, pinned tweets, and the ability to share multiple photos in one tweet.
In theory, the mute function might be incredibly helpful when a specific event hijacks your feed and you need a break. Take the NCAA championships, for instance. Plenty of people I follow to read interesting commentary about culture, tech, and current events are also huge college basketball fans. Me, not so much. So if I’m cruising Twitter and want all that noise to go away, I can mute the most fervent sports tweeters and focus on the Scandal live-tweeters. It’s less extreme than an “unfollow,” which might hurt someone’s feelings. And when the event is over, I can easily bring that person back to my feed.
The other side of this, which I assume will be the real outcome of this feature, is that you might temporarily mute someone and then completely forget that he exists. The muted will live in a purgatory between being unfollowed and followed because most people — especially the people who use Twitter — have short attention spans and limited memory.
But that’s not an entirely bad thing. Passively tuning a person out is a very human way of communicating. You’re having a bad day, someone is bugging you over text, so you just don’t reply or care to look at what he has to say. It doesn’t mean you completely reject his existence as a human being; it’s just that there’s so much noise out there that sometimes it’s nice to have a volume button.
Follow Alyssa Bereznak on Twitter or email her here.
