A Better Twitter Mute Button

Essay Begins

The twitter mute button can be so much more if we look at it from the perspective of why people mute other users in the first place.

I believe people use Mute as the landing space between consumption and non-consumption or in twitter terms following and unfollowing.

Muting People

You may mute a friend for example because they tweet about topics that do not interest you but rather than unfollowing (because they are your friend), you mute them. I.e. you follow them but you do not consume their content.

To be clear, this is conjecture and may require a formal study.

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Muting Topics

You may also mute topics you are not interested in seeing. E.g. You may mute #MUFCVMCFC because you do not want to know the scores of the football match, you’re not a fan of football, the tweets about this topic are simply clogging your TL and so on.

Muting People Should Not Be Binary

These two approaches- muting people and muting topics- would work in an ideal world if people used twitter exactly how it was intended. E.g. if all users tweeted about one area/topic (which may be evident in their bio), then it would be easy to mute them as you can easily determine if the topic suits you. Or if all users tweeting about football always use the (correct) hashtag, then it would be easy to mute them.

But this approach is flawed because people are complex and have different interests and not all interests align so it’s hard to determine when to mute and when not to. 

Users Get Punished

Time is a factor. Sometimes a user may like the content they just muted, other times, they do not want to see it at that present moment. People should not be punished for those other times. Here are 2 scenarios to help illustrate the point

• A person you follow may be tweeting unwanted content on a tuesday night (e.g. about a live broadcast) that you have no interest in, as it’s clogging your TL, you mute the person. After tuesday night, the person never tweets about it again yet the person is muted forever
• Sports matches often use the same hashtag over and over again and some users mute them temporarily as they can create spoilers. Twitter allows you to mute hashtags for 24 hours, 7 days etc which can work in an ideal world but people often forget to use the hashtag when tweeting especially if the event is happening live. This resorts in users muting people they follow forever due to that one incident.
• Mitigation. Some people on twitter are known to create different accounts to manage their interests as they do not want to be “off-brand”. But this solution is not scalable and creating/managing multiple accounts is hard work.

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