Twitter Tries Out a 'Mute' Feature on Mobile

Let’s be honest — Twitter’s following system falls apart when you have a noisy friend. On Facebook, you can simply stop that person’s posts from showing up without unfriending them, but Twitter has no comparable function (at least officially). It’s either deal with it or unfollow.

But that might change.

According to a post from The Verge, it appears Twitter may be testing out a “Mute” feature for its mobile apps. This feature would presumably let you silence someone you follow on Twitter without unfollowing them outright. Much like on Facebook, unfollowing someone can sometimes have damaging consequences for friendships or work relationships, so a mute function would serve to keep a certain user’s tweets out of your timeline while keeping their ego intact.

I can think of a few instances where mute would be useful. Is your friend livetweeting the crap out of the Oscars? Mute. Is someone repeating the same Apple keynote information you’re getting from thirteen other sources? Mute. Is someone going off on a political rant and you’d really rather not? Mute.

For a service like Twitter, a mute feature makes crazy amounts of sense, and it’s surprising that the ability to mute another user took this long to show up.

Of course, if you’re a TweetDeck user, mute is no big deal to you. The feature has been around for quite a while, and you’ve probably been wondering why the Web and mobile clients didn’t have it. If Twitter’s limited test of the feature turns into a full-on release, I’m sure no one will be complaining.

What remains to be seen is how the feature would treat mentions. If I’m muting another user and they mention me in a tweet, will I still see it or will it be filtered out? I’d imagine the revelation that someone is muting you could be just as bad as learning that you’ve been unfollowed.

Any thoughts on the possible Twitter mute feature? Drop us a line below.