Twitter’s newest experimental feature is a pair of virtual earplugs.
The microblogging service is testing a function that you can use to mute account you’re following without actually unfollowing that account, reports The Next Web. Some people using the official Twitter iOS app are now seeing the option to mute folks they follow.
Is muting someone a new twitter app feature? pic.twitter.com/YjIdDqm7H7
— Serenity Discko (@serenitydiscko) May 1, 2014
The mute function will hide someone’s tweets from your feed until you remove it, but you’ll still see direct messages and notifications tied to that account.
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We don’t see the muting feature ourselves yet, but that doesn’t surprise us: The social network has been known to regularly roll out experimental features to small slices of its overall base.
“We’ve tested various features with small groups of our 200 million users before determining what we’ll release,” wrote Twitter engineering vice president Alex Roetter in a blog post last September. “In recent months, that trend has picked up — so much so that it’s rare for a day to go by when we’re not releasing at least one experiment.”
Muting is a popular feature in third-party Twitter apps like Tweetbot and Tweetdeck.
