For the rest of us there are ways to get the best from twitter.

The "home" screen is where they insist on showing you random shit, trends and vitriol. There are setting you can flip to turn these off, however I can't remember them.

This is where lists come in

They only work[1] if you unfollow everyone but a handful of close contacts, or people who don't "like", "had got a reply" or retweets stuff that annoys you.

once you have a small "clean" set of contacts, you feel like you're missing out, this is where lists come in.

You can now setup a bunch of lists for various interests that you have. List timelines don't have any bells and whistles, they are almost linear time, and have none of the "x has received a reply" shit on the home timeline. It also allows you to partition your timeline by your mood. So if you're not in the mood for politics, don't look at the politics tab.

[1] it works for me

But I still spend way too much time saying “see less often” to things. Hopefully this mute list works well!

I also use Tweetbot on my Mac, which allows me to filter retweets. That means I only see what people say. I do use another filter on my National Basketball Association list to block a certain keyword.

The downsides of Tweetbot is that it doesn't support everything that Twitter offers (polls, probably fleets, etc.) and is about $10.

Sorting by "Latest" rather than "Home" makes it so you don't see their likes and replies. I would recommend it to anyone.

I really wish there were more aggressive options to do that in lists, some people have great content but retweet an insane amount of things as well and it'd be nice to be able to exclude those from a list but not universally across the whole feed like you can with block words.

Twitter has mute filters that do this. Add the surnames of some political candidates to your mute filters, and that alone will improve your Twitter experience - moreso if you use a third party client (like Fenix on Android or Tweetbot on iOS) that doesn't also show likes or random tweet suggestions from people you don't follow.

The downside is you have to put in the filter creation work yourself, but on the plus-side you know exactly what you're filtering out and why. Don't leave it to Twitter to be the judge of what you should and shouldn't see. If you look in your settings, you'll find Twitter is absolutely horrible at determining what you're interested in: on the Twitter website, look at More -> Settings & Privacy -> Account -> Your Twitter Data -> Interests and Ads Data -> Interests From Twitter, and be amazed at all the topics you've never heard of and political candidates that Twitter thinks you are interested in, and is using to push ads and tweet suggestions in your face.

Bonus points for adding other clickbait words to your mute filters, like "outrage". Maybe consider various -isms, like "capitalism" and/or "socialism" if you want to avoid being drawn into decades long debates that won't be solved in 280 characters.

I'm a relatively new Twitter user and I've been making heavy use of the list functionality. So what's the down side?

Damned if you do: people will question your political stance.

Damned if you don't: you'll lose a lot of users who uses twitter for various reasons other than politics and warfare. People that just want to relax and unwind, be entertained, and plug into the matrix.

Seriously though I think a better UI for muting topics would be a better user interface than hardcoding these things. In twitter you can mute topics but you gotta dig through the settings first.

It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.