The Beautiful Sound of Twitter Mute
Which Twitter effectively muted this week…
Sometimes when using Twitter it feels as if I’m taking crazy pills. One such moment happened this past week.
While scrolling through the feed, I would see people replying to other tweets. But when I would click on those tweets to drill down, I couldn’t see the tweet they were replying to. There was the thin blue line (denoting a thread), but I couldn’t see from where it began. It was a thread to nowhere.
Turns out, this is because at some point I had muted the person who started the thread. But mute didn’t work like this until a recent change because when I would do this same routine previously, I could see any and all tweets (unless I blocked that user or they blocked me) with a couple clicks. But now, in order to see what tweet people are replying to, you have to go to that user’s profile to try to hunt down the tweet — which, as it turns out, is pretty hard to do out of context!
And judging from the reactions when I tweeted about this, I’m hardly alone in noticing, and being annoyed by this change.
Look, I get it. Twitter has a major harassment problem. And this change would seem to be a part of working towards fixing that. But it makes no sense to me. I obviously get the notion of never wanting to show muted users to the people who mute them, but mute should work differently if you follow those users.
This is the case for many of the tweets I describe above. I both follow a lot of people (around 1,000) and mute a lot of people (over 100). I use mute quite liberally because following 1,000 people is too much information to sort through. And also because a lot of people I know tweet really fucking stupid things that are useless to me. And yet I still want to be able to have a DM conversation with those people if I need to.
I realize this is probably a bit of a “power user” problem. But conceptually, I think the way I do things actually makes sense. If I never want to see a person’s tweets, or if they’re harassing me, I’ll unfollow them (if I followed them for some reason), then I’ll mute them if that’s not enough. Then, if still not enough, I’ll use block. As the Twitter gods intended. But on the surface, mute is a more lightweight way of just keeping people out of my feed.
I think the main issue here is that people want the ability to stop seeing people in their feed without alerting them that they’re not being seen — when you block someone, it’s pretty clear that they’re blocked if they just try to visit your profile. But that should just be a granular setting. Block and Mute should not effectively be the same thing.
Blocking is for assholes. Muting is for jokers.
Mute is one of the greatest tools Twitter has ever built, in my opinion. Of course, as with most things related to Twitter, Tweetbot does it better: mute should be more granular. You should be able to mute someone for a couple hours, half a day, an entire day, or a week. This would solve the “issue” with sports tweets (when myself and others from the tech world tweet about sports during games) and similar such tweets during, say, the Grammys. The longer mutes would allow for a “penalty box” of sorts — something I effectively use mute for right now (mute them as a first step towards a potential unfollow if their tweets don’t shape up).
But again, at the very least, mute should not be the same if you follow a person versus if you do not. For the former, you’re still following them for a reason, and I think it’s fine to be able to see their tweets if you drill down into a tweet to see a thread. Also I think it’s fine to see their tweets in replies to your own tweets, by the way (this hasn’t been the case for a while, I believe). The intent is simply to keep them out of your main feed.¹
If you mute someone you do not follow, they’re probably some sort of lightweight troll or just an annoying person that you don’t want to see. But still, you don’t view them as problematic enough to block them.
So that’s three levels. And I’m drilling this home because it feels like it should be obvious:
- Mute for people you follow: don’t show tweets in feed, but show otherwise, including replies to your own tweets.
- Mute for people you don’t follow: don’t show tweets in feed, don’t show replies, but maybe show tweets if you’re trying to drill down (I could go either way on this).
- Block: never show tweets, either in feed or in replies, and don’t show them when you drill down. And, of course, don’t let them see your tweets.
And please, for the love of Twitter, give us granular muting.
¹ A topic which was also a bit more nuanced at one point, it would seem.
