Twitter launched an app that “politely” mutes annoying followers

Twitter launched a new feature a few days ago, available to all PC and mobile users sometime soon, giving users the possibility to mute Twitter fellows without renouncing to follow them. It seems this feature is designed to give Twitter users more control over whatever pops out, sometimes in the worst of times.

So, you can choose to silence a follower and he won’t see you muted him, whatever he tweets, and also notifications about his activity, will no longer appear. Users can mute or unmute other users as many times as they want, and at any time they want, without the muted user to know. He will still be able to tweet or reply to his “muter”, but nothing will appear on the last’s time line.

Even if the feature promises anonymity, and regardless of how attractive such a feature might seem, the choice to mute a follower even without him knowing, could raise some unwanted comments and probably some serious arguments between Twitter friends. But still, if you think about it, it’s a rather polite way to keep people silent, even if they don’t know it, which sounds even better considering some muted fellows can’t handle someone telling them to shut up.

“Twitter is a series of interlocking communities and in many of these communities, people very much pay attention to who follows them, so, in a way, unfollowing is a noticeable act. It’s a snub. But when you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, but their updates annoy you, the mute feature is a great idea”, said Jim Tobin, Social Media Marketing Speaker.

“Adding this feature is a good idea for Twitter,” said Tobin, “but they need to be careful they don’t add a lot of confusion at a time when they are actively trying to make the service easier to use for new users.”

Some say it’s about time Twitter came with an interesting feature that could also be useful to people. Considering the social media is now an important part of our lives, Twitter made this move at the right time, offering this new “product” that’s also made to personalize and clean the daily news feeds. So a mute button seems to be very welcomed, considering the network really needed to rid its platform of spam and bots. It seems this was a bigger problem than being tweeted on and on.