‘Tweet-gagged’ Twitter Mute Function

This Twitter Mute Function could be a nightmare for small businesses that are just trying to get their message out. Or could it be a useful tool for skimming off those who BROADCAST endlessly, self-promoting sales-y drivel with no real value or creativity.  Perhaps they ought to be ‘Tweet-gagged’.

You decide.

I read the info and immediately thought ‘Tweet-gagged’ that’s what people can say when they find out their 95% self-promoting tweets are no longer being seen by a majority of tweeters.

Based on the first few paragraphs of the Twitter blog post below, I have bolded the content that gives me pause.. I am playing devil’s advocate so I am not saying this will definitely happen, simply that it could happen.
You will find my comments directly below the quoted text.

From Twitter Blog may 12 2014 By Paul Rosania (@ptr)

Today we’re beginning to introduce a new account feature called mute to people who use our iPhone and Android apps and twitter.com.(1) Mute gives you even more control over the content you see on Twitter by letting you remove a user’s content from key parts of your Twitter experience.

In the same way you can turn on device notifications so you never miss a Tweet from your favorite users, you can now mute users you’d like to hear from less.(2)

Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline,(3) and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user.

The muted user will still be able to favorite, reply to and retweet your Tweets; you just won’t see any of that activity in your timeline.(4)

The muted user will NOT know that you’ve muted him/her,(5) and of course you can unmute at any time.(6)

My Comments on the Twitter Mute Function

• (1)  Correct me if I’m wrong but, is that not “All tweeters?”
• (2) This could be very useful for all those tweeps who only want to sell you followers, up until now i have added them to a public list called ‘Selly Selly NO NO‘ not much shame factor there, however it does separate them for me.
• (3) On the surface this seems like a good thing, less tweets and retweets cluttering up the stream UNTIL ( dun dun dun…for effect)
• (4) The aforementioned result of ‘muting’ could end up putting you in a really unfortunate place the ‘Bad Netiquette Pool’. I believe it is imperative to say ‘thank you’ for RTs and MTs and favorited tweets. Once you mute someone any and all of their tweet love/RTs etc will NOT be apparent to you.  I can see this becoming an issue for some who perhaps, mute too many early on and then drown in the  ‘Bad Netiquette Pool’
• (5)   Because the muted tweeter (‘tweet-gagged’) has no idea what you have done they will wonder why no tweet-love from you?  Should they get offended and call you out on your lack of Netiquette (4)  you may have to (6) a lot!

Check out the full post on Muting a Twitter User  Let me know what you think in relation to the points I’ve made or any other points you want to mention.

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