Twitter Blog:
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.
It was happening quietly before, but it’s now officially official. You can also only mute users, not hashtags. Which makes sense, because hashtags are the most annoying thing in my timeline, but they’re also where Twitter makes money.
I can’t get on board with muting. I know I’m an edge case, but if I want to mute someone, I just unfollow them for a while. If I miss them, I end up following them back again.
In my opinion, Twitter endorsing user muting completely obfuscates the network. In the last 12 months, if I wanted to know if someone is interesting enough to follow, I’d look at who else I knew that was following them. That was usually good enough for me; it was like a quick endorsement, a simple “oh, this is Joe, he’s cool” from a friend.
Now (like Facebook) I have no idea whether this is a I’m being polite but they’re muted-type follow, or a this person says good stuff, listen to them-type follow.
Everyone still knows who’s following who, but nobody knows who’s really listening to who. Only Twitter itself will know.
It might make your timeline less crowded or annoying in the short term, but I believe muting degrades the experience of using Twitter in the long term.