While Twitter is rolling out its new one Twitter blue Subscription service, some of us still long for the old days when the timeline was just a bunch of tweets at a time from people you wanted to follow. There is a mute list hack that will supposedly help you mimic this old school experience, but does it really work?
The hack is Here, and it’s just a list of keywords to mute in order to clean up your timeline. If you are not familiar with the mute function, just go to your Twitter settings under “Content Settings” and you can mute any word or phrase for 24 hours, a week, a month or forever. If you’re fed up with a meme or don’t want to hear about a particular politician, you can put them on your mute list.
But back to that keyword hack: it’s based on the assumption that certain internal Twitter tags will appear with the things you don’t want on your timeline. For example, if someone you follow replies to someone you don’t reply, both tweets will appear on your timeline, and in theory there is a special keyword that denotes that. Or if someone you follow “likes” a tweet that wouldn’t otherwise show up for you, Twitter might decide to show it to you anyway. Those little snippets of things you might have missed or suggestions people should follow? They are supposedly included in this hack as well.
Unfortunately it does not work. The comments on the Github page are mostly positive, thanking the author for posting the list and indicating that the one or two people who don’t get it to work are doing something wrong. But the naysayers are right. Twitter itself tweeted when this list went live that muting these keywords won’t remove suggestions from your timeline.
But I tried just in case. I went through the list and muted everything from ActivityTweet to suggest_pyle_tweet to suggestrecycledtweet_inline. And the result – in my browser and in my phone app – was Bupkis. I still have tweets that say “[your friend] and 3 others liked “and”[your friend] replied “despite the mutes.
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One reason why it can be easy to believe they work? Twitter doesn’t insert its suggestions in a predictable way. After you mute the words, you may not see any of them for a while. I was scrolling my Twitter feed endlessly while researching this article, and even before I muted the keywords, I didn’t see many of the suggested tweets. They only show up when you least expect them, I suppose.
Could it be that the muting disappears certain suggestions that I didn’t notice during testing? Maybe, but it’s hard to confirm. I tried searching through the keywords from the list in the HTML page source for my Twitter timeline and they didn’t show up (even if I looked directly at a suggested tweet and even inspected that element). If this feature ever worked, Twitter must have changed their code to evade it. Or maybe it was wishful thinking all along.
