avi
Skilled
If you spent time on Twitter today, you probably heard talk of Twitter’s new muting feature. Muting a fellow Twitter user will scrub their tweets and retweets from your home timeline, but replies and mentions from them will still appear in your notifications pane.
Functionally speaking, Mute has its roots in Twitter’s attempt late last year to change the way blocking a user worked. At the time, Twitter made it so that blocked users could follow and see your tweets, but their interactions with you wouldn’t show up in your feed. However, Twitter undid the changes just hours after launch when a number of users quickly decried the new policy because it made them feel less safe.
Today’s launch of the mute button isn’t just a relabel of the aborted block feature. Twitter did rethink the user action and came up with a better way to cast it. In their current iterations, block and mute solve two different problems: safety and noise. Twitter’s mistake in the case of last year’s blocking furor was to try and change user behavior around a highly charged, and potentially dangerous, subject: abuse.
When Twitter tried to change blocking, it defended the decision by pointing out that blocked users could already view tweets from public accounts anyway by just going to a user’s profile page. It also claimed that the new feature was more secure because it removed the error prompt that users received when trying to follow someone who had already blocked them.
more: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2014/...years-block-gaffe-doesnt-solve-noise-problem/
Functionally speaking, Mute has its roots in Twitter’s attempt late last year to change the way blocking a user worked. At the time, Twitter made it so that blocked users could follow and see your tweets, but their interactions with you wouldn’t show up in your feed. However, Twitter undid the changes just hours after launch when a number of users quickly decried the new policy because it made them feel less safe.
Today’s launch of the mute button isn’t just a relabel of the aborted block feature. Twitter did rethink the user action and came up with a better way to cast it. In their current iterations, block and mute solve two different problems: safety and noise. Twitter’s mistake in the case of last year’s blocking furor was to try and change user behavior around a highly charged, and potentially dangerous, subject: abuse.
When Twitter tried to change blocking, it defended the decision by pointing out that blocked users could already view tweets from public accounts anyway by just going to a user’s profile page. It also claimed that the new feature was more secure because it removed the error prompt that users received when trying to follow someone who had already blocked them.
more: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2014/...years-block-gaffe-doesnt-solve-noise-problem/