With the use of social media, we sometimes friend or follow people who we know but aren’t too close with. There are also some people who constantly update their newsfeed with unnecessary statuses and pictures, which becomes annoying easily. However, that doesn’t mean we want to block/unfriend/stop following them. It takes a whole new step to then friend them back, there will be misunderstandings, etc. In the end, it wouldn’t be worth it to “de-friend” someone for that reason.
Twitter came up with “a new mute feature that’ll let you shut up the annoying people in your feed”. By muting the person, Twitter will mute the user’s tweets and retweets so that the view is hidden until the person blocking the user is ready to ‘un-mute’.
I think Facebook and other social media should start coming up with this too!
Here is the article
This reminds me of what Facebook does when we don’t want to see certain things posted by certain people. On Facebook, you can click on someone’s post on your newsfeed and there’s the option that says “I don’t want to see this” to keep that person’s posts from showing up on your newsfeed again. I think this option on Facebook and Twitter’s mute feature come in handy when you want to filter the kind of content that shows up on your newsfeed. It’s the better option to let Facebook know you don’t want to see posts from someone and to mute someone on Twitter than de-friending them or unfollowing someone. It’d be quite awkward to add someone again when they didn’t even realize you unfriended them or follow someone again when they thought you followed them the entire time. I feel like these options that Facebook and Twitter present to us are in a way kind of like the “dislike” button, but just more subtle about it. I think if both Facebook and Twitter added the option to dislike a post or a tweet, chaos and controversy would ensue. Instead of disliking something, we can just choose to let social media know we don’t really want to see it.
I think that the idea of some type of muting or a time-out switch is a great idea. It is nice to see done updates and it is often how I “catch up” so to speak on what and how my friends and colleagues are doing. However there are some people who constantly update every day, every hour on what they eat, wear, etc etc….. that is beyond ridiculous and totally unnecessary. No one wants to know every aspect of anyone else’s life at least not me and I don’t wish to unfriend anyone on my list because I don’t have a large list (intentionally) and I do like my friends so I wouldn’t want to offend them.
I would like however to “mute” them for a bit, and I think this idea should be immediately adopted my other social media sites. This could also work in an office setting as well, chatty co-worker….mute for 30 minute intervals 🙂