On May 12th, Twitter announced that they'll begin rolling out a mute function to all users. I don't know their timeline, but I know I don't have the feature yet. In an opinion piece mentioning this new feature, the author said that "you shouldn't need to use it."
Seriously?
The argument is you shouldn't be following anyone uninteresting anyway, and except in a few circumstances, you should just unfollow them.
Clearly the author hasn't had to deal with people who live tweet television shows or movies or--God help me--their workout at the gym. These are people I'm happy to follow most of the time, just not when they're doing this live tweeting thing. I give this a solid ten on the Annoy-O-Meter.
There are also authors I'm following who I can't unfollow for various reasons who tweet nothing except promo--either their own or another author's promo in a tit-for-tat exchange. I already skip past anything they tweet the instant I see their name or recognize their avatar. The mute button will save me even having to skim over their tweet.
Maybe an author is doing a Twitter chat. That's also very annoying and one of those things that would be awesome to turn off until the chat is over.
Shouldn't need to use the mute button? Please. I'm looking forward to the mute button making Twitter more pleasurable and it's already my favorite of the social networks.
