Keeping Twitter a Happy Place
Using mute filters liberally on Twitter can help keep your experience sane, less rage inducing, and overall a place that you can enjoy and not get sucked into the vitriolic tweets so often expressed. You don’t need to see everything on Twitter. There may be topics that you have an interest in but reading peoples reactions to those topics and being inundated with them constantly may not be good for your soul. Don’t think that you have to immerse yourself in this on Twitter. Of course, one solution is to stop using Twitter altogether but personally, I find a lot of good information and people on Twitter and when I am conscious about the time I spend on there I really enjoy it. Thus, I’ve chosen to use mute filters for many topics.
In order to mute on the native Twitter app you can read the instructions here but personally I prefer either Twitterrific or Tweetbot’s mute filters because you can use regular expressions for more gradual control of your mutes. For example, you can add an asterisk to the end of a word to mute all forms of the word. I can put in and it will mute tax, taxes, taxing, etc. Instructions for Twitterrific can be found here and Tweetbot here. Here are some topics and keywords (I am constantly adding to this list) that I’ve muted to make Twitter a happier place:
- Politics - so much of the political conversation on Twitter is harsh and just not good for people’s sanity. Some keywords I’ve found helpful: tax*, legistlat*, POTUS, SCOTUS, president*, Trump, Clinton, Russia, and more
- Sports - soccer*, NFL
- Annoying - follower*, Dr. Who, CNN, Fox News, How I did on Twitter this week, android
- Hashtags - if an annoying hash tag appears I just mute it immediately
- Websites - certain websites I may be interested in reading but don’t need to see constant tweets about them. This is why I use RSS
- Accounts - certain accounts I just never want to hear from
Don’t get sucked in to FOMO and think that you may be missing something important. If it is really that important you will come across it eventually and if you miss out then it probably doesn’t matter in the long run. Keep Twitter a happy place and curate it for topics and people your interested in.