We should all be passionate about reducing the noise around us online. The clutter makes it difficult to process good information and just makes any experience painful. Sometimes the reduction needs to come from the content creators, but a more sound option is to take matters into your own hands.  Luckily you have options.

I am a big fan of Twitter.  It is a great community and I have managed to connect with lots of like-minded people there.  The problem is that sometimes events, trends or Twitter itself will insert itself into my experience.

Anticipating this, Twitter has armed us with their “Muted Words” tool.  This tool can be found at:

https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords

When there, you can enter any term and Twitter will exclude Tweets with that word or phrase.  Unfortunately it does not allow for wildcards, so you need to be specific. 

This works really well when you are being hit on all sides by a news story or the death of someone famous where every other Tweet include their name.

Lets take a quick look at the interface:

I love Twitter’s Dark theme. This is how Batman must tweet.

As you can see, you have a lot of options.  For temporary events you can have it expire in a day, week or month.  For particularly troubling terms, you can mute them forever.  My current list is over 50 words long and it has really helped.

But what about the tweets that Twitter inserts into your life?  Recommendation and related Tweets?  How do you deal with them?

Twitter has strings you can add to your muted words to make those posts disappear as well.  Just remember when you add them to make sure you are muting Notification “From anyone” for these to be effective.

You will need to add them one at a time, which is a little tedious, but believe me, in the end it will be worth it.  Here are the strings:

suggest_recap

suggest_who_to_follow

suggest_activity

suggest_activity_tweet

suggest_recycled_tweet_inline

suggest_recycled_tweet

suggest_grouped_tweet_hashtag

If you do not notice a change right away.  Be patient.  While I noticed immediate changes on my Desktop version of Twitter, it seemed to take a bit long for the app on the phone to react.

Hopefully this will make your online life a little cleaner and give you a bit more control over what you see.  Your Social Media is only as good as the people and info you surround yourself with.  So take your digital life into your own hands and let the Muting begin.