Show HN: Mute.vc – Mute Investors on Twitter

[davnicwil]

To be honest, I don't really understand this meme of investors on twitter being universally bad or something one would want to mute out.

A well known investor on twitter actually did the 'follow, wait for follow back, then after some time unfollow' thing on me recently. When people do this, as a rule I unfollow them again when I notice, but for this person I actually didn't because they genuinely tweet interesting and useful things that I appreciate having in my feed!

[tw1010]

They're not all bad, far from it. But sometimes a few actors poisons the well of a whole label (ehm, shark tank), causing some people to have an allergic reaction to the whole class (even if it isn't true that all of them are bad).

[fitpolar]

I’d love it if there was the equivalent for this, but for politics.

[coolswan]

who is this person I should follow?

[g82918]

Showing some example of particularly egregious thought leadership and maybe an animation of it being silenced would go a long way towards helping. I blocked twitter.com in a hosts file, so I can't see if it embeds any tweets.

[smegma2]

I'm curious how you managed to block twitter? Somehow when I add twitter.com to my /etc/hosts it doesn't seem to have any effect.

[geoah]

It would be nice if it mentioned how it works as well as who it will be affecting.

Is it unfollowing these people, is it muting them, etc?

Clicking "continue with twitter" asks for a lot of stuff including "Mute, block, and report accounts for you.", "Follow and unfollow accounts for you.", and "Post and delete Tweets for you".

[meagher]

Good point. Show, not tell.

Once you log in, you can see a bunch of accounts and either mute/unmute one-by-one or in bulk.

Twitter doesn’t give very many options for developers (read, read/write, read/write/dms). So unfortunately in order to POST to /mutes, the app gets access to more than it needs.

[geoah]

Seems there are some screenshots on github that show a list of people with options to mute/unmute individually or in bulk.

https://github.com/tmm/mute.vc/tree/master/.github/screensho...

[kohtatsu]

>report accounts for you

Wait, what kind of use-case is there for this?

[juped]

Needs a bunch of high-profile logos (of people you're muting) after the three-horizontal-blurbs part.

[coolswan]

Feature request: Mute.politics please.

[tw1010]

Isn't everything politics in some form or another?

[ErikAugust]

Looks like the list of investors is here: https://www.twitter.com/tomfme/lists/investors.

The Twitter list you use is configurable.

My one thought is you could probably move the usernames over to a file you could version control with the idea of accepting PRs.

[meagher]

Someone found the list!

Great idea - thought about doing it, but was out of scope for a holiday hack because of Twitter’s rate limiting.

[krtbgb]

Great idea. Would love to see some examples of the muted content.

[giancarlostoro]

Is there something this does that I can't do with Twitter OOTB? Seems like an odd problem to resolve. Maybe I don't use Twitter enough.

[meagher]

not really other than bulk mute/unmute.

was a gimmicky hack i threw together over the holiday so i could turn on/off vc twitter easily.

[geoah]

Same thought. I assume it's pre-made lists of people who spam or get retweeted by the people they fund?

[css]

Why not just use a block list[0]?

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2015/sharing-block-lists-to...

[meagher]

if you mute someone, you can still go to their profile and see their tweets.

blocking is more extreme - neither user can view each other's content (says you are blocked by @username).

[madamelic]

Seems odd to include Ryan Hoover and Niv Dror.

Ryan Hoover is generally pretty innocuous and is also the founder of ProductHunt, something builders might want to hear about. And ShrugCap pretty much just makes fun of SV VC.

[WarOnPrivacy]

What we need is something to eliminate "Recommended For You" mentions.

After that, a Promoted Tweet muter would find wide appreciation (using uBO for that now).

[dataisfun]

I suppose I'm a combination of relieved, offended and proud to not be on the list.

[omarhaneef]

Does twitter force you to follow people you don't want to hear from?

If I didn't want to hear from someone, wouldn't I not follow them in the first place?

What is the use case here?

[1MachineElf]

Maybe it has something to do with how Twitter will suggest tweets to you that meet their algorithms' threshold for popularity when the account that tweeted them is simply one that the people you follow also happened to follow.

Plus I think there are socially left-leaning people in tech who want nothing to do with anything distinctly related to capitalism, and so ousting investors from their circles is seen as "good praxis" or whatever they call it.

[meagher]

i see a bunch of tweets from folks i don't follow through retweets and (more commonly now) favorites. this let's me switch that on and off.

overall, this was a little hack that everyone i talked to thought was funny.

[danalec]

will this mute filtering the twitter connector for feedly?

[abalashov]

I hope this ushers in a new cultural moment!

[DC-3]

> Blazing fast mute and unmute

It's a javascript program. It's not going to be blazing fast by any reasonable definition. Ironic that a program designed to filter out Silicon Valley bullshit has succumbed to Silicon Valley bullshit.

[parhamn]

You think they meant js vs assembly? Perhaps the better read would be that they meant js vs clicking on each profile and hitting mute/unmute?

[connor4312]

Writing software in JavaScript has long been in the realm of practical, productive activities.

I think bashing on software built with JavaScript is far more "Silicon Valley bullshit" than the act of writing it :)

[stestagg]

It’s fast coz the cpu be blazing ;)