
Show HN: Mute.vc – Mute Investors on Twitter - meagher
https://mute.vc/
======
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).

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I don't understand the allergy mechanism, though. Can't you just... mute the
bad actors? I can't grasp the frame of mind where I'd need to preemptively
mute people who are (believed by some guy known only as "Tom" to be) shallow
VCs.

~~~
tw1010
I mean the boring answer is that people have patience and energy constraints.
They arbitrarily ignore the whole group because VC isn't adjacent enough to
their life goals, or something, to warrant the energy necessary to pick out
the patience-stealers from the insight-givers.

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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.

~~~
g82918
I used
[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/a...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/alternates/fakenews-
gambling-social/hosts).

Check the bottom of the list for the social ones.

Edit:
[https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts)
repo link.

~~~
devtul
Any community-driven blocklist is bound to be infiltrated by bigots, no
thanks. I _just_ watched a Project Veritas (which is in this blocklist)exposé
of a Bernie staffer saying "Gulags were a lot better than the CIA has told
us".

~~~
Aperocky
It probably is, unlike nazi death camps, gulag prisoner behave more like city
dwellers in the middle of Siberia. There were no fences because of you leave
the camp/city there’s almost 0 chance to survive. Condition were brutal during
Stalin years, primarily due to lack of food. A number of cities started as
gulags/incorporated gulags still exist in Siberia/Arctic.

If you picture a camp with fences and prison guards, yeah that’s wrong.

If you think I’m defending gulags, note that all of what I’ve said are
objective and can be factually proven/disproved. If you feel that way, you
probably should investigate your own bias (i.e does my feeling preclude me
from believing in facts?)

~~~
devtul
It is not hard to be better than a concentration camp, there is a huge range
of bad above the nazi camp level. I read Gulag Archipelago, so yes I might
have a bias.

> gulag prisoner behave more like city dwellers

I don't even know what to make of this

> A number of cities started as gulags/incorporated gulags still exist in
> Siberia/Arctic

The ones exploring natural resources would be my guess, first with forced
labor, then as a normal economy after this.

> If you think I’m defending gulags

It does sound like it, you even put a disclaimer

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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.

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

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coolswan
Feature request: Mute.politics please.

~~~
tw1010
Isn't everything politics in some form or another?

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hnal943
Only if you have a terrible worldview.

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

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

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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.

~~~
giancarlostoro
What tech stack are you using for this?

Edit nvm found it at the footer:

[https://github.com/tmm/mute.vc](https://github.com/tmm/mute.vc)

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css
Why not just use a block list[0]?

[0] [https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2015/sharing-block-lists-
to...](https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2015/sharing-block-lists-to-help-make-
twitter-safer.html)

~~~
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).

~~~
dawnerd
I block a ton and you can still see their profile. It just says they're
blocked though with a button to view.

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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.

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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).

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

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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.

~~~
devtul
Seeing how widespread the use of blocklists is in lefty circles, nothing to do
with anything challenging of their dogma.

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danalec
will this mute filtering the twitter connector for feedly?

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abalashov
I hope this ushers in a new cultural moment!

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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.

~~~
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 :)

