The tension of muting Twitter to make it useful

I’ll admit it, I’m a big muter. I mute hashtags, annoying noisy businesses or events — even people I really like but who social makes me start to hate. If you’re reading this, and I follow you, I probably muted you once. I’m sorry.

(Thankfully, TweetBot has options to mute for a day, for a week, a month — or forever, so it might not have been for long.)

But as a result, it’s easy to start to “bland” out your feed.

It’s tempting to block topics like “Trump”. You’re likely to find yourself less distracted in the day, less wound up by the news cycle.

But you risk detaching yourself from the real-time flow of information that is so interesting in social. And so, you start to get a little less value from using the platform overall.

I’m going to admit: for the first time, I feel my Twitter feed might be less of a help than a hindrance.

But perhaps I’ve destroyed the serendipity by curating it so tightly. In the early days, the etiquette was much tighter about following people back and there was no mute. As a result, there was a serious stream storming past every day, and you had to take the good with the bad.

At the same time, I think people with nothing to say tweeted less. They are noisy now.

Little by little, I wonder if my muting policy has thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

So what next?

Is the only solution now to unmute en masse? Or to unfollow everyone, and rebuild? Do we even know the best approach for what Twitter is now vs what it was when we first got attached?

Break it

What I do know is that the only way I’ve tended to make Twitter work was by being bold enough to accept the risk of breaking it.

7–8 years ago now, I had just been introduced to it and couldn’t quite see any value coming through from a feed dominated by Stephen Fry. So I followed 1000 accounts.

There was plenty of noise. But gradually, I whittled away the rubbish. And the more I did that, the more I found that I was left with was great.

I don’t think you can really “break” your Twitter as long as you accept it will always need to keep moving forward. And the price you potentially pay for not mixing it up may be much greater than just taking the risk.

First experiment: back to the mega follow. Will report back.