By Jason Snell
December 13, 2017 3:42 PM PT
Muffling many tweets in Twitterrific
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
There are a lot of annoying things on Twitter. My Twitter client on macOS and iOS, Twitterrific, will filter them out. You just need to know how.
You can quickly create a muffle from the contents of a tweet (people, hashtags, or web addresses) by tapping the ellipsis icon in a tweet, then choosing Muffle. But if you want to filter particular words or go a little bit more, you’ll need to access the the full-on interface.
On iOS, all filters live behind the Muffles tab in the sidebar. On macOS, it’s the Muffles tab in the Preferences window. (These locations are also where you can upgrade a Muffle—it collapses a tweet so you can’t see its contents, but you can see why it was filtered out—into a full-on Mute, which entirely removes it from view.)
As helpfully explained by The Iconfactory, Twitterrific supports more than just filtering on arbitrary text strings: you can use regular expressions to create powerful sets of filters, or to pile a whole bunch of rules together in a single place.
For example, I want to mute everything about the new Star Wars movie until I’ve seen it, so I created a muffle rule:
Last Jedi Spoilers :: (The Last Jedi)|#starwars|#thelastjedi|Jedi|TLJ|porg
This rule, titled “Last Jedi Spoilers”, blocks all instances of the phrase “The Last Jedi”, related hashtags and acronyms, and more. It’s not necessarily going to stop everything from getting through, but if I see some string I hadn’t anticipated, I can add it to the list.
This is the part of the story where I mention that even though I don’t use it, there’s a Twitter app called Tweetbot that’s very popular and it has these filters too, so if you use Tweetbot and aren’t taking advantage of them, you should give it a go.
Whenever I feel like there’s too much noise in my Twitter feed, I redouble my efforts to seek out strings and hashtags and sites I don’t want to see and get them out. It makes my feed a more pleasant place to be. And, yes, it lets me avoid film spoilers from time to time.
If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.