If you’re sick of politics, sport and general world news then you’re probably best off avoiding social media altogether.
But if you want to have your cake and eat it, there is another option to prevent unwanted items filling up your precious timeline on Twitter. Try Mute, a way to quickly mute 100 words from Twitter as chosen by the wisdom of people on the internet — aka crowdsourced.
Twitter has long supported muting words, but Mute makes it easy to really get into the feature. Its Mute.life website lists 100 keywords that have been added and then voted on by visitors to form a ranked list. By installing a bookmark in your (Google Chrome) browser, Mute can be used to automatically add those top 100 words into your muted word list for Twitter.
To get started, visit Mute.life and follow the instructions on the left-side of the screen. You can mute individual words, but the process behind that is pretty cumbersome since it involves copy-paste and manual entry. A better approach may be uploading the full 100 and then removing those you words that you don’t want to mute. Consider Mute the starting point.
I took Mute — which was created by nomadic developer Pieter Levels — for a spin and it worked as advised. Within a few minutes I had 100 muted words set up.
The only problem was the crowd — the main selling point — since many of the words I had muted weren’t topics that I wanted to banish from my timeline altogether.
There’s not going to be much left in my timeline if I mute all of these
That said, I’m not really the target audience here. I can’t remember muting any/many keywords over the years. But, if you’re someone who is looking to make use of Twitter’s mute feature, then this service gives you a jump start at doing that.
Levels said on Product Hunt that he is working to bring Mute to Facebook — that’s certainly a feature that would appeal to more people, so we’ll stay tuned on that.
Update: Facebook muting is now supported too — full details on the website here.