Can You Really Turn Off Twitter’s Algorithm to Stop Showing Recommended Tweets?
As Twitter launches its new subscription service, Twitter Blue , some of us still yearn for the old days, when the timeline was nothing more than a bunch of tweets, one by one, from people you decided to follow. There is a trick with the mute list that supposedly helps you simulate this old school experience, but does it really work?
The hacker is here , and this is just a list of keywords that you should disable in order to clear your timeline. If you are unfamiliar with the mute feature, simply go to Twitter settings under Content Settings and you can mute any word or phrase you like for 24 hours, a week, a month, or forever. If you are bored with memes or don’t want to hear about some politician, you can add them to your list of mutes.
But back to this keyword trick: it’s based on the assumption that certain internal Twitter tags appear along with things you don’t want in your timeline. For example, when someone you follow responds to someone you don’t know, both tweets appear in your timeline, and in theory there is a dedicated keyword that marks this. Or, if someone you follow “likes” a tweet that you wouldn’t otherwise have, Twitter may decide to show it to you anyway. Those little snippets that you might have missed, or suggestions that people might follow? They are also supposedly included in this hack.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work. The comments on the github page are mostly positive: they express gratitude to the author for posting the list and suggest that one or two people who can’t get it to work are doing something wrong. But the skeptics are right. Around the time when the list was published, he Twitter wrote in Twitter that disabling these keywords will not lead to the exclusion of sentences from your timeline.
But I tried it, just in case. I went through the list disabling everything from ActivityTweet to suggest_pyle_tweet and suggestrecycledtweet_inline . And as a result, bupkis appeared in my browser and in the app on my phone. I still get tweets marked “[your friend] and 3 more likes” and “[your friend] replied” despite the sound being muted.
One reason why it is easy to believe that they actually work? Twitter doesn’t insert its sentences predictably, so after you turn off the words, you might not see any of them for a while. I scrolled through my Twitter feed endlessly while researching this article, and even before I turned off keywords, I didn’t see many of the suggested tweets. I guess they only appear when you least expect them.
Is it possible that muting the sound can make certain suggestions disappear that I didn’t notice during testing? Possibly, but difficult to confirm. I tried to search for keywords from the list in the HTML page source for my Twitter timeline and they didn’t show up (even when I looked directly at the suggested tweet and even checked that element). If this feature ever worked, Twitter must have changed its code to avoid it. Or maybe all this time he was passing off wishful thinking.