Muted words is the only thing that makes Twitter useful for me. Totally takes the temperature down by just excluding things that aren’t useful to see. I mute everything from specific words that I know are going to spark useless arguments to phrases/emojis that show up in intentionally provocative tweets (eg, “that’s the tweet” or the clap emoji).
Twitter has quite an extensive option to mute things nowadays. Such as keywords, phrases, usernames and hashtags. That's how I can keep following people that sometimes go on political rants.
You can put in all your political
words like “Trump” “Biden” to remove from your feed
This has improved my Twitter 10x. IT people can be so annoying on Twitter, they basically all have the same political stance.
I have a lot more respect for the people who just tell people to vote.
If you, like me, find the non-political part of Twitter valuable, I have discovered that Twitter has built in filtering tools.
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.
Go to https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords, you can mute words you don't care about. The feature is a bit hidden in the settings, but the twitter experience is way better once you remove content that makes you angry.
I find the use of muted words to slightly better the issue of receiving tweets from people I don’t follow. At least the topics their tweets are about will not be a topic I don’t want to read about.
Simply blocking “Trump” made a massive difference for me. My accounts are all specialized and have nothing to do with politics, and yet no matter who I follow my feeds turn into at least 50% Trump stuff.
But I still spend way too much time saying “see less often” to things. Hopefully this mute list works well!
I get a lot of value from Twitter's AI and computer graphics communities, but I used to see a lot of retweeted political garbage too. I found that Twitter's "mute words" feature works wonders. After muting about 100 words ("trump", "obama", "republican", "democrat", "evil", "lied", "nazi", that obnoxious hand clap emoji, etc) it's like a whole different place. Much less rage-inducing.
That's exactly why the "mute words" feature is great. Everybody you want to follow on Twitter is going to retweet some political trash sometimes. Curating the people you follow can't fix this, but "mute words" can.
Muting key words is a fantastic way to weed your Twitter garden. I mute many politician names and organizations (and variations like possessives and plurals) and annoying memes of the week. Even then, a surprising amount of related tweets get through (because the muted word is in a linked news article or attached image, not the Tweet text).
Unfortunately, the mute list has a hard coded limit of only 200 words. I'm always hitting that max and needing to retire old words, which is a hassle.
Also, Twitter's own ads are not affected by the mute list. I mute words related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, yet I still get ads that contain those exact words.
I have done exactly this with Twitter's "mute words" feature, and let me tell you it is incredibly great. I would have abandoned Twitter long ago without it.
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