It was, whoa, nearly six years ago that I humbly requested that Twitter give us the ability to follow someone without actually having to listen to them talk.
Why would we need such a feature?
But there are a lot of people who for some reason are greatly offended when you don’t reciprocate a follow…on Twitter… When this happens (and it happens a lot), you have a choice – deal with the fallout (“that guy is such a jerk”) or just friend the person and avoid the pain. Here’s the problem, though. When you follow too many people the service just becomes unusable.
The Fake Follow looks like a normal follow to the other person, but to me it’s like I didn’t follow them at all. This solves the ego stroking issue (and related problems) that so many people have, and it keeps the content stream clean and usable.
Twitter announced that exact thing today.
Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user. The muted user will still be able to fave, reply to, and retweet your Tweets; you just won’t see any of that activity in your timeline. The muted user will not know that you’ve muted them, and of course you can unmute at any time.
They’re calling it “Mute,” but we know exactly what it is. A Fake Follow. A glorious thing.
Uncrunched 
If you don’t like Twitter anymore, try Sublevel.net 😉
Numbers doesn’t speaks, it’s the words that matters and twitter trying to let users understand this.
Interesting that Twitter didn’t adopt this sooner, but like you’ve said in your linked post, with the amount of tweets on your timeline I think Twitter hoped that they’d get lost somewhere in the timeline without you seeing them (one hopes) and with it being more of a content follow site rather than being focused on friendships. I guess a ‘Fake Follow’ as you’ve so aptly put it is the polite thing to do in terms of social media etiquette in the current day and age. However, you could say that a positive of Twitter is that one is not forced to have a mutually agreed friendship.
That´s right, not forced at all and you can mute them without being noticed, so you won’t be shown up as impolite (if you care). But anyways fake followers are not big deal, what matters is the relevant activity from followers in your timeline.
Great news. A few months ago I hooked up my business twitter account to my phone and removed it 30 minutes later as the phone constantly beeped with updates. This new feature will bring a greater signal to noise ratio for us all.
Reblogged this on What They Dont Teach You At Stanford Business School and commented:
I didn’t know muting was possible on Twitter.