The mute button is Twitter's most underrated feature

Let me know if this sounds familiar.

There's a person you follow on Twitter. You have only a tenuous connection to this person IRL. Perhaps you followed one another at a party years back and occasionally cross paths.

But despite the fact that you don't actively keep in touch, you're still well acquainted with their day-to-day. You know that they just adopted a cat, that their new office has an iced coffee keg, that they visited a friend in San Francisco last week and posted, like, 15 times about it.

But unlike a former friend you're not likely to see again, it's unavoidable that you'll run into this person at some point in the future. Plus, you really like this person! They've always been so nice! You're simply tired of seeing their near-constant social media updates.

This is where my holy grail Twitter feature comes through: I employ the mute button.

Twitter made mute a permanent product feature in May 2014, meaning users could finally opt to avoid a certain user's content without burning any bridges in the process. Three years later, in 2017, the company added the capability to mute certain words and phrases, following calls for better policing of online abuse.

Finally, Twitter was offering a more nuanced way to control my online experience. I took to the feature immediately, muting with abandon.

I muted overzealous celebrities, publications tweeting every 10 minutes, even the occasional dear friend (sorry!), and in the process experienced none of the guilt I associate with unfollowing people online.

The beauty of the mute feature is that it's easy to undo. If I've had all I can take of live updates from a friend-of-a-friend's vacation, I can mute them for a short time without damaging the connection. It's so simple, and yet such a transformative feature for those of us who spend a ton of time glued to feeds.

Facebook, too, has its own version of the mute function, meaning it's simple to unfollow a friend's activity without unfriending in the process. But it's Facebook-owned Instagram where the lack of a mute function – or something like it – is most glaring.

Critics of the photo-sharing app have already decried its decision to abandon the chronological timeline in favor of one based off an algorithm that thinks it knows us best. And with the lack of a mute function, my Instagram feed is the one I feel I have the least control over.

Rumor has it that Instagram has heard our grievances – one of them, at least – and is testing a mute function of its own. Which...oh my god, finally.

A mute button would give users the power to further curate their Instagram feed – the one social feed where aesthetics actually matter – to reflect what a user knows she wants to see, not what an algorithm guesses she'll be interested in.

In the meantime, I'll be recklessly muting on all other social platforms until live-tweeting concerts stops being a thing we all do now.

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