[HN Gopher] List of Twitter mute words for your timeline
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List of Twitter mute words for your timeline
Author : rmason
Score : 276 points
Date : 2020-01-24 20:03 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gist.github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gist.github.com)
| alexellisuk wrote:
| Thank you Ian. Congrats for #1 on here
| tadzik_ wrote:
| You can also use tweetdeck.twitter.com to pretty much the same
| effect.
| suyash wrote:
| how to use this?
| josefresco wrote:
| On the web: https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords
|
| Also available in the app in settings. You need to add each
| word one at a time.
| paulpauper wrote:
| blocking political words works wonders for me too
| josefresco wrote:
| Yes I considered posting my political term block list but
| didn't want this threat to devolve into a flame war. I cringe
| wondering what my timeline would be like without those muted
| words.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Yeah also most of the social issues too. Too much of outrage on
| Twitter. Leave the slacktivism to Facebook...
| cpeterso wrote:
| I've noticed that muted words don't mute ads. I've muted words
| like "blockchain", "bitcoin", and "Ethereum" and yet I still see
| ads for blockchain startups. Shouldn't the fact that I went out
| of my way to mute a word be a strong signal that I am not a good
| match for an ad??
| reificator wrote:
| > _Shouldn 't the fact that I went out of my way to mute a word
| be a strong signal that I am not a good match for an ad?_
|
| That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is as
| a strong signal that you're not already invested in a competing
| service so acquisition should be much cheaper.
| joombaga wrote:
| Maybe that signal is only acknowledged if you turn ad
| personalization on.
| kentbrew wrote:
| If you don't like the way desktop Twitter periodically overrides
| your system settings and returns you to "top" tweets, try Twitter
| System Saver: https://github.com/kentbrew/twitter-setting-saver
| no_flags wrote:
| Am I correct in assuming these are mostly to filter out tweets
| pushed by Twitter from people I don't follow?
| swanson wrote:
| Yeah it removes all of the random "liked by someone you follow"
| or "popular in your network" etc tweets that slowly creep in
| over time.
| jakub_g wrote:
| Yesterday Twitter started showing me "someone you don't
| follow replied to another person you don't follow" types of
| conversations and it's gotten really absurd at this point.
| raphael_l wrote:
| This happened to me yesterday as well, only it was "liked"
| instead of "replied". In my confusion I clicked on the
| account, since I didn't recognize it. Only to mistakenly
| click the Follow button, as my brain didn't manage to
| correctly derive the current status of it. Because I
| actually thought I had accidentally followed them or
| something similar.
| Reventlov wrote:
| Yeah, some explanation about these would be nice. I know I can
| figure it out alone, but, still, an explanation wouldn't kill
| anyone.
| tyre wrote:
| feel free to add one in the comments section of the gist
| Fenrisulfr wrote:
| Awesome, added it to my twitter. After refreshing, I wish there
| was a way to remove "Promoted" tweets still.
| lildoggo wrote:
| I wrote something very similar for reddit a while back using an
| extension called Tampermonkey. Reddit uses the same CSS classes
| on all their promoted content so if twitter does this same this
| could work.
|
| Basically, you make an eventlistener on the scroll wheel and do
| document.getElementsByClassName('promoted-css-class-name').
| Loop over the array of elements found and set the element style
| to 'display:none' for every element found every time you
| scroll.
|
| Not the most efficient approach, but effective!
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Oh, adding the event listener to the scroll is very clever. I
| was trying to do it "right" and using a MutationObserver to
| find when they added nodes to the document but this gets too
| convoluted fast.
| mayneack wrote:
| Blocking significantly reduces the numbers, but they come back
| over time: https://blocktogether.org/show-
| blocks/njFjyOn40oKxRW8XJLmN70...
| bluetidepro wrote:
| For promoted, you'll need to use like a browser extension or
| something 3rd party to remove those. I would be VERY surprised
| if they gave native ways like this to mute the main income
| source of their platform (promoted tweets/ads). haha
| dvtrn wrote:
| They have the "See this less often" option if you click the
| options chevron within the promoted content. I'm convinced
| it's a placebo feature but...that's just me.
| izzydata wrote:
| You'll get less of that ad and more of another ad.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Yeah, that (placebo), or it could mean "see this less
| often" of this TYPE of ad. So more about the content than
| the actual ad. Again, I highly doubt they are just going to
| let users use the platform without any ads.
| dvtrn wrote:
| That's the more probable reality, yup. It's just
| signalling to me maybe it's time finally just bow out and
| get off this platform once and for all.
| zbuttram wrote:
| My assumption is that is only for the particular ad or
| company and that they will just show you ads from other
| places instead. More of a way to nudge the system into
| showing you more "relevant" promoted tweets than actually
| removing them.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Block the accounts as they come, and you stop seeing any of
| them.
|
| In my experience, the vast majority are time-limited movie
| accounts.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Hitting not interested also eventually starts to work. On
| desktop ublock origin actually manages to strip them all out
| anyways.
| pzumk wrote:
| This doesn't work. I have blocked over 26k accounts and I
| still see ads. I don't have blocked Apple or DuckDuckGo and
| most of the time I see those, but every single day I'm
| blocking more and more sponsored accounts because they keep
| appearing. You can't block all of them.
|
| Here's my Block List. Not sure why it didn't update for two
| months, maybe it doesn't work anymore:
|
| https://blocktogether.org/show-
| blocks/BrCdgyZpXmLQ25akOwtgfR...
| mayneack wrote:
| They come back, but it's significantly lower volume than
| without the block. I recently made a new account and was
| surprised by the volume.
|
| Mine is 100% (I think) from blocking ads, if you want a
| second source: https://blocktogether.org/show-
| blocks/njFjyOn40oKxRW8XJLmN70...
|
| (it's also updated 2 days ago)
| slackwalker wrote:
| I use a slightly modified version of this UserScript in
| TamperMonkey: https://github.com/ZedNaught/blank-promoted-
| tweets
|
| The change I've made is that I set the display of the promoted
| tweets to none, rather than setting their opacity to 0:
| article.setAttribute('style', 'display: none');
| bluetidepro wrote:
| I would love to see this list updated with example screenshots of
| what each one actually mutes.
|
| Either way, I had no idea Twitter muting worked like this, where
| you could actually mute TYPES of tweets, and not just content IN
| the tweets. I don't think they go over this in their docs:
| https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-m... -
| I wonder if they will block this or break this if it picks up
| steam since it would lower their engagement numbers some (half
| the reason they stuff all this extra junk in your timeline, to
| begin with).
|
| I can't imagine this is something that's intended or expected,
| but I could be wrong. I'm guessing OP is going to end up
| regretting posting this awesome little "hack" once they change it
| so it no longer works. haha
| ehsankia wrote:
| Or even better, for these to be actual settings on Twitter, not
| some hacky secret hidden keyword that you have to get off of a
| gist on hackernews.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah it looks like something that accidentally works because of
| their implementation rather than something they actually want
| to be possible.
| shawnz wrote:
| Maybe it's a "backdoor" added by some lower level devs who
| don't have access to the official controls for hiding the
| spam for themselves.
| capableweb wrote:
| Would would hope that a big service like Twitter has checks
| and balances in place so no "lower level dev" can add
| whatever they feel like to the production service.
| inetknght wrote:
| Your hope isn't compatible with "move fast and break
| things"
| misiti3780 wrote:
| seems like you have to add them one at a time ?
| thinkmassive wrote:
| There's a bit more detail in this article from last August that
| describes the same thing:
| https://osintcurio.us/2019/08/01/muting-the-twitter-algorith...
| longtom wrote:
| This must be documented somewhere?
| sincerely wrote:
| Can't you just sort your timeline to Recent for the same effect?
| baddox wrote:
| Also: a list of mute words for Twitter to ignore when they see
| this!
| CathedralBorrow wrote:
| I think they might have seen this when they implemented this
| feature in their software.
| baddox wrote:
| Perhaps, although I'm not so sure. The muting feature as
| documented is clearly intended to apply to the actual content
| of tweets. The keywords in this list clearly seem to be
| things that would appear in, say, a JSON representation of a
| tweet, but wouldn't be part of the actual textual content of
| a tweet. Of course it's possible that they deliberately
| implemented this as an undocumented power user feature.
| dvtrn wrote:
| I think you're right. As an example, I have the word/name
| of a certain political figure 'muted', however will
| continue to see tweets involving that figure if a friend
| retweets a tweet that has an embedded 'card' linking to a
| news article featuring said political figure.
| cabaalis wrote:
| I don't use twitter much but it does feel cleaner with these in
| place.
|
| I'm assuming though that this is a technicality of
| implementation. Since it changes their preferred experience, I
| can't imagine these keywords will remain available to block.
| neves wrote:
| Must enter one by one? Can't I copy and paste everything?
| lucb1e wrote:
| If you look at the request it does, use "copy as curl", replace
| the word with "$word", and put it between:
|
| xclip -out -selection clipboard | while read word; do <the curl
| command>; done
|
| Then you can probably do the whole list at once.
|
| There is probably also a javascript way to automate this, but
| if they do it with ajax, this might be faster. Since I do this
| sort of automation regularly, I aliased the clipboard pasting
| to "c-v"[1] and so it's quite easy for me to do this sort of
| thing quickly without having to remember the exact flags and
| type all of that.
|
| [1] .bashrc addition: alias c-v='xclip -out -selection
| clipboard'
| capableweb wrote:
| If you feel like trying something else than xclip, xsel
| allows you to easily remember the command with just `xsel -o`
| instead of that.
|
| Also, if the JS way would use AJAX, it would take the exact
| same time to perform the requests via the browser, as it
| would with curl, unless there is some particular quirk with
| their server/setup/deployment/god, or if you have a computer
| that doesn't run Twitter (the client side application) so
| good (bottleneck in cpu/ram rather than network speed)
| maxaf wrote:
| For optimal effect, add the following to your /etc/hosts or its
| equivalent on your system: 127.0.0.1
| twitter.com
| fernandotakai wrote:
| i... don't agree there.
|
| twitter is what you make of it. if you follow toxic people, you
| will get a toxic timeline.
|
| me? i follow close friends, a bunch of economists from all
| sides (mostly from my own country) and some comedians. that's
| it. my timeline is super clean, i open every once in a while
| and it's never bad.
|
| (side note: i met both of my best friends on twitter. oh and i
| also met my wife on twitter. it's not a bad platform as long as
| you can curate what you see).
| thebigshane wrote:
| It sounds like the common reply regarding Reddit quality and
| toxicity as well. Don't visit the front
| pages, stay in the curated sub-reddits.
|
| I think it is good advice but the low-quality and the
| toxicity of the front/main pages still inevitably ends up
| bleeding into the smaller channels.
|
| And the fault is still on Reddit/Twitter themselves because
| they aren't/can't ever de-emphasize those main top-level
| channels, as that's their main audience and so that's where
| they make money in advertising.
| uncle_j wrote:
| Toxicity seems to be a code word for "the plebs are saying
| things that I don't approve of".
| maxaf wrote:
| That's how Twitter started for me too, but after a while
| degenerated to become the toxic mess which finally drove me
| away. My experience goes to show that people change over
| time: some, whose influence I formerly found enlightening,
| reverted to behavior that made me angry and unhappy. Soon
| others followed suit. Eventually signal was drowned in noise,
| so I quit.
| ppod wrote:
| If you stick to "latest", you pretty much just see
| chronological ordering of those you follow. Every time you
| see a toxic tweet, unfolow the person. The world is big
| enough that you can still have an active and healthy
| timeline even following these rules. Just like life really.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Keep follows/lists at 50 people or less of which no more
| than 10 are high volume tweeters. If people turn toxic,
| either mute them for a week or unfollow them if they keep
| it up.
|
| It happens where a lot of people just have a bad week and
| need to rant, but it does get annoying. Doing it this way
| you won't lose out on insightful stuff they usually post
| and keeping the lists smaller gives you glimpses into area
| events or interests without drowning you.
|
| EDIT: Also, add 'unroll' to your mute list.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The platform itself optimises for outrage and encourages it,
| explicitly worsens the user experience with the "algorithmic"
| timeline and stuff you don't care about like tweets from
| accounts you don't follow, etc.
| rconti wrote:
| I don't know how you managed that. I don't follow "toxic
| people" but Twitter just doesn't work. The use case for
| Twitter seems to be to follow important thinkers in areas you
| care about, so I get to hear what a renowned scientist had
| for lunch, an out-of-context reply from a computer security
| researcher said to someone else I don't know about something
| I don't understand, and that an F1 star took his family to
| the zoo.
|
| Maybe I'm just the wrong audience for twitter. Facebook, as
| problematic as it is, has people I actually know, with their
| real names, and their real pictures, and their real life.
|
| The nature of an "open" platform like Twitter seems to be
| specifically for people who want to hear from people they
| don't know, and unfortunately the content from those public
| figures is almost never about the thing you actually follow
| them for, because, guess what, people are multi-faceted.
|
| Add to that the outrage-driven like/RT algo and I think it's
| toxic by default.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| ... and then host my own local Mastodon responding to
| twitter.com locally?
| davvolun wrote:
| This joke never adds anything to the conversation, I wish
| people would stop making it.
| maxaf wrote:
| Wasn't meant as a joke.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Keith Henson explained a great joke about the local loopback
| address 127.0.0.1 under oath to the Church of Scientology
| lawyers in a sworn deposition once.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891
| C14L wrote:
| Or, for the entire list
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...
| glowcoil wrote:
| You can just switch from "Home" to "Latest Tweets" and all of
| this goes away.
| lkesteloot wrote:
| Exactly. In some interfaces you'll be eventually switched back
| to "Home" automatically. You can tell this has happened because
| Twitter becomes less awesome. When I find myself thinking, "Why
| does Twitter suck today?" I scroll up and find that I'm back on
| "Home".
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| What I want is an option in the dropdown menu next to tweet to
| mute the tweeter for 24hours. Sometimes, someone randomly goes on
| a tirade you don't want to scroll past.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Tweetbot has this (along with week, month, and forever).
| Plough_Jogger wrote:
| Twitter already provides the option to mute phrases or accounts
| for the following periods: Forever, 24 hours from now, 7 days
| from now, 30 days from now
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| That involves interrupting your session to go into settings.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Topics worked so well until they decided to reinvent them few
| months ago. Now:
|
| * Some key topics missing
|
| * The ones that are not missing, miss key people
|
| * They keep adding me to new topics that I have 0 interest in
|
| Also, Topics were always in Explore tab that showed all sort of
| shit that I don't care about. Should be a separate tab for topics
| (though useless now, so don't bother I guess).
| WA wrote:
| - create a private list
|
| - instead of following people, add people to the list
|
| Bam. No ads, no suggestions, no "x liked this", reverse
| chronological order with no missing posts.
| josefresco wrote:
| Lists are a pain to access IMHO on purpose although they've
| improved it slightly.
|
| Open App
|
| Press on avatar
|
| Press Lists
|
| Press desired list.
|
| vs.
|
| Open app
|
| Now on desktop, using bookmarks, or a client like TweetDeck
| this is a valid solution.
| brandur wrote:
| This has improved quite a bit on recent versions of the
| official mobile clients. If you go to your lists, you can
| "pin" a list, which has the effect of making it an alternate
| timeline from the app's home screen.
|
| It's a little subtle, but on home you'll now have "Home" and
| your list's name at the top of the screen, with the active
| one getting a blue underline. Swipe left or right to select
| one or the other.
| frandroid wrote:
| Yeah, I would love to be able to have a list shortcut on my
| phone's homescreen.
| Grue3 wrote:
| Except the list doesn't show more than 200 tweets (unless
| there's some trick to avoid this). If there's a sudden spike of
| activity, or you check it only once a week, it's easy to miss
| something important.
| Simon_says wrote:
| LOL. I block Twitter at the DNS level. I've never missed
| something important.
| penagwin wrote:
| Then this entire thread is irrelevant to you. Why are you
| here?
| Simon_says wrote:
| It's the top of HN.
| p49k wrote:
| There is a "hide" button made specifically for your
| situation.
| skyyler wrote:
| This is ostrich behaviour.
|
| "La la la, I can't hear you, you're not saying anything
| important"
| rdiddly wrote:
| Actually they don't do that, and neither would I if I
| could run 50 mph, was huge, and preferred breathing air,
| but anyway: Importance (which is import, meaning) is
| mostly subjective. If there's such a thing as objective
| importance, attention is probably orthogonal to it. And
| to subjective importance too, at least at first, but then
| extended attention probably increases
| perceived/subjective importance just as protracted
| inattention decreases it.
| richk449 wrote:
| Seems perfectly reasonable. Here are some reasons:
|
| 1. The fraction of people on the world on Twitter is very
| small. Either most people in the world are missing
| important information, or not being on Twitter doesn't
| cause one to miss important information.
|
| 2. If something important does occur on Twitter, it will be
| repeated on other news sources. It seems like half the news
| stories these days are just a bunch of tweets surrounded by
| boilerplate.
|
| I think that listening to emergency radio is a good model
| for Twitter. It might provide you with information earlier
| than relying on conventional sources, and it might provide
| you with more blips of information, but not all of that
| information is necessarily correct, and you will spend a
| lot of time and not gain much of value over traditional
| sources.
| danso wrote:
| I don't think the emergency radio analogy makes much
| sense since Twitter's value is more than just reading
| tweets. It can be used for initiating and participating
| in discussions.
| richk449 wrote:
| Fair point. Maybe radio in general is a better model.
| Some people use it to have conversations with friends,
| and some people use it to listen to the emergency
| channel.
|
| It still means that cutting it out of your life won't
| doom you to missing important information.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Sounds like a feature. If it is important you shouldn't rely
| on twitter to find about it anyway.
| munk-a wrote:
| I dunno, it's a tool, you can use it how you'd like to use
| it.
|
| Twitter is kinda weird in that there are some blindly
| obvious UX improvements everyone is aware of that Twitter
| refrains from because the poor UX is subsidizing their
| business model.
| [deleted]
| hanniabu wrote:
| I _think_ you can also get around this same stuff by just
| creating a tweetdeck and creating a column for people you
| follow.
| TacoToni wrote:
| Interesting - i think i read that @Naval does the same thing.
| [deleted]
| hesk wrote:
| Unfortunately, you cannot turn off retweets in lists, at least
| on the Twitter website or iOS app. I disable retweets for most
| of the people I follow. Fortunately, in Tweetdeck you can
| filter retweets for each list individually.
| ianbicking wrote:
| Is there any fast way to populate a list with everyone you are
| already following?
| krausefx wrote:
| I wrote an open source script for this a while ago, it's
| annoying to run due to Twitter API limits
| https://github.com/KrauseFx/twitter-unfollow
| jessriedel wrote:
| I believe you can batch add the people you follow to a list
| using this Chrome extension
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icotile-twitter-
| fr...
|
| In particular, there is a "select all" button. It may break
| if you have too many people, though.
| Tomte wrote:
| I just did that. When it came to choosing accounts for the
| list, Twitter presented those I follow and I could choose
| them with one click each.
|
| I don't know if it works with many follow-ees(?), I have only
| a few.
| throwawayh3h3ti wrote:
| Does anyone know if there is any way to mute every twitter
| account that contains their "pronouns" in their bio? I have a
| running theory that nobody with gender pronouns in their bio has
| anything of value to add to the conversation. Thank you for
| coming to my ted talk.
| mattbk1 wrote:
| If you want to see tweets in order, or not see promoted tweets,
| or not see tweets faved by people you follow, just use a third-
| party app.
| jomoio wrote:
| Life got so much better after blocking "@threadreaderapp unroll"
|
| Interested to see how these work.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I don't use twitter and I don't really know what this is, but
| it's at the top of the hn. I mean, I obviously know what twitter
| is and have read tweets, but otherwise this is kind of foreign.
| Can someone explain what these are used for?
| Lammy wrote:
| These are used to block various categories of "fake tweets"
| that tend to appear in your Twitter timeline. They are mostly
| growth features / edge stories such as "account you follow
| liked this tweet from an account you don't follow".
| ehsankia wrote:
| As Twitter grows, they stray further and further from just
| showing you tweets from people you follow, and start showing
| all sorts of other crap you didn't ask for in your feed, such
| as "person X liked this tweet" or "here's a tweet from someone
| you may like", and so on.
|
| There is no "official" way to disable these annoying entries in
| your feed, but over time people have found secret "tags" that
| if you put in your mute list, will achieve what you want.
|
| This here is a list of all those available tags. There's no
| real description of what "kinds" of tweets each block other
| than the vague name though.
| hesk wrote:
| The official way is to switch from Home to Latest Tweets. It
| works quite well, actually.
| agersant wrote:
| It automatically reverts to home every few days (at least
| using the official Android app).
| siegecraft wrote:
| Twitter (unintentionally, I'm sure) built an adblocker into
| their app
| busymom0 wrote:
| Can someone explain how this works? I was expecting to see a list
| of words but this seems like some keys or object names.
| binarymax wrote:
| It's gone. The garbage is all gone. I can look at twitter again
| without cringing. IT'S A MIRACLE.
| tech234a wrote:
| This list was originally released here:
| https://twitter.com/iancoldwater/status/1212902068739919872
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(page generated 2020-01-24 23:00 UTC)