Hot on the heels of its glossy new profiles, Twitter has now unveiled its new Facebook-like setting where you can ‘mute’ the people you don’t want to follow, but have some sort of obligation to do so. You don't have to see their tweets clogging up your timeline, but you also don't have to run the risk of them finding out you've stopped following them. It's a very happy medium, which will result in far fewer 'What did I do wrong?' emails.
Here are the nine types of people we suggest you might want to mute:
1. The person with the passionate interest in something very boring
You follow them because they’re your go-to on, say, make-up. However, they also have a very detailed and passionate interest in something else. Let’s say it’s Homes Under The Hammer. This person, and this person only, will simply need to be muted when the time rolls around for them to clog up your feed with comments about balustrades and creaking floorboards which they, and they only, will live-tweet when the time comes.
2. The oversharing friend
You love her in real life – she’s friendly, kind, doesn’t come across as too vain. But on Twitter, she constantly sub-tweets her ex (who’s not even following her on Twitter), blurts out big news about a member of her family’s health or goes into grotesque detail about her cat’s litter tray. Somehow she manages to smile for about three selfies a day, too – which she then goes on to share with the world via social media.
**3. The cross-platform gloater **
When someone posts to Instagram, the photo doesn’t actually show up on our feed. So, to be honest, if we cared, we’d follow them on Instagram and spend all of our data allowance looking at their beautiful, twee life and those perfectly white-spaced photos they take of it. But we still have to follow them, because we know you IRL and it’s going to get awkward because sometimes we like to be in those #blessedSunday posts.
4. The people who get really annoyed when you talk about something of cultural significance
Irate that people are doing something that doesn’t interest them, instead of simply ignoring the debate, these tweeters add approximately nothing to the conversation by making a snide joke about how boring it is that everyone is going on about something that might be a very legitimate zeitgeist. That they’re taking the time and effort to mock these things probably indicates that you should unfollow them, but if they’re normally OK, or happy when that zeitgeist revolves around one of their interests, then a momentary muting could work. Hopefully, these people will have muted anyone talking about the initial issue at hand, so you might never have to silence their bleak musings on it.
5. The wannabes
Using purposeful-cutesy misspellings, CAPITAL LETTERS, acronyms, long-running in-jokes and other Twitter-specific formats of communication, they try to mimic the way their favourite tweeter tweets but they forget that their favourite tweeter might not actually be that great at tweeting, but just has a huge profile.
**6. The white girl who’s just discovered urban lingo **
There’s a point where we have to let go and realise that we are potentially just as embarrassing as that time when Richard Madeley dressed as Ali G on This Morning.
7. People who use 25-word hashtags
That’ll never trend. Stop trying to make it trend.
8. The consistent self-promoters
It’s cool if their work is funny and great and entertaining, but we’re following them for pithy one-liners, hashtag games and speedy responses to big situations probably too big to be condensed into 140 characters. We don't just want to follow links to their blog. Time for a hasty mute.
** 9. Anyone who is not SoSadToday or Cher**
Seriously, these accounts are perhaps the best things to have happened to Twitter and sometimes we just scroll through their pages and just theirs alone.
Follow Sophie on Twitter (you can mute her afters) @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.