I’m thinking of finally biting the bullet and getting a Twitter account. The chances that I’ll ever post anything on it are microscopic (I vividly remember what happened to James Gunn…among OTHER things); mostly I don’t see any option to block or mute anyone and I’m hoping that signing in will allow me to do that.
I’ve read some stuff about blocking before but have never read a discussion about how exactly it works. Does it completely remove the offending party from all posts permanently, like it should? How is muting different?
Finally a GQ that I can give an expert answer on, my phone shows that I’ve spent 17 hours on Twitter in the last 7 days.
When you block someone, they will not able to see your tweets. They will still see your profile pic but they will see a message that this person has blocked you. This is different than Facebook. On Facebook, they can’t even see your profile al all, it’s as if it doesn’t exist once you’ve blocked them.
Muting is where you don’t unfollow the person, you just don’t see their tweets. Maybe someone has gotten a bit too political lately or maybe they’re posting a few too many gym selfies. You can unmixed them at any time and you can both see each other’s tweets.
Finally you can also unfollow someone, they’re not blocked, you just don’t see their tweets any longer. For example, when I move to DC later this year, I’ll unfollow a lot of local Chicago twitter accounts. No hard feelings, but I don’t need to know the Burger of the month at my local burger joint when it’s 600 miles away.
The person you’ve muted doesn’t know that this has happened, so it’s ideal if someone continually sends you annoying replies. They can still send them, but you never see them.
You can also mute phrases and hashtags. I do so for a couple of popular TV shows that I don’t watch, but that lots of the people I follow do. It helps keep the feed a bit more relevant.
Ah, good to know. For all of the criticism Twitter gets (and rightfully so), it seems to be way ahead of the curve when it comes to taking out the trash. Thanks, will try these out soon!