

Why Muting is the next big era of the Internet - kine
http://blog.zackshapiro.com/muting-on-the-internet

======
russell
I dont belong to twitter or facebook or subscribe to many feeds. I filter my
email. I dont answer my phone if the caller id is blocked or calls from 800
numbers or out of area numbers that I dont recognize. Presto, a manageable
information flow.

I dont worry about being in a filer bubble. I sample other viewpoints, but I
certainly dont want a flow of conservative or religious views. I like my
bubble. After all, it includes HN.

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zxcdw
Quite frankly Muting in HN would be great, especially during the times like
these when a celebrity dies and people go nuts over it.

I want this to happen.

~~~
jakeonthemove
I believe it's possible to do with AdBlock Plus and the Element Hiding Helper
addons in Firefox, with a custom rule.

I use it to hide a few annoying toolbars and news bars on several sites.

~~~
kine
Interesting. Thanks Jake. Going to check this out!

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tijs
I think there definitely is a market for better filters. But i do think it's a
bit weird that we seem to need more technology to save us from technology.
Instead of muting users you follow the more obvious fix is simple; unfollow
some of those people, unsubscribe from those newsletters, mailing lists and
RSS feeds and basically close the tap instead of corking the firehose.

~~~
kine
I completely agree. Self-restraint is a huge piece and something I don't talk
about in the post.

I'm more talking about muting topics from sources you like. I want to
subscribe to you on Twitter but I don't want your SXSW tweets, for example.

~~~
tijs
Yes that makes sense. Not an easy problem to fix as ideally it would take
minimal management but as new 'keywords' need filtering with every new event
flooding your stream you'd be spending all your time filtering. Kinda defeats
the purpose. Maybe you'd want to set a maximum distraction level per day over
all your social media and simply mute the biggest meme offenders
automatically. I might even sign up for that :)

------
alttab
I think a Muting API is just demonstrative but probably over-kill. Needing a
muting API across apps is a clear symptom of over-using technology for the
sake of it.

Sure, it makes your "life" "easier", but really, how hard are our lives right
now? The best way to be "productive" with technology is to choose it
selectively.

In my own experience, I found I can be 10X more productive than my peers if I
choose to be. Its easier to choose to be with the less distractions / follows
/ whatever you have in your life.

I've been writing code for 16 years, butter my bread from the technology
industry. But really, I use VIM for my coding, read Hacker News, browse Reddit
as a guilty pleasure, use Amazon for shopping.... and thats it. Thats really
it. No Facebook, Twitter, iphone/android apps, feed readers, chat roulettes,
literally nothing. Its all superfluous.

This also means I have a pretty good eye for great software, as if I can see
getting value out of it I know its a winner because my bar for "value" is
pretty high. I was speaking with a local Austin start-up because I saw the
value instantaneously and wanted to be a part of it. They were acquired before
I could get an interview. In fact, I could probably use this intuition to make
angel investments and just live doing that.

The "muting" concept should be reserved for cleaning up the experience from
Trolls, my whole point is if thats the problem you are facing - you have over
subscribed. This is true for software, why do you need an app for each and
every task in your life? Its crazy.

~~~
icebraining
Computers are superfluous. You can live without them. Yet we prefer to deal
with them and take advantage of their benefits; the same can be true of
Twitter, Facebook or feeds (though I only use the latter).

~~~
alttab
diminishing returns

------
auggierose
How do I apply this to all the Aaron Swartz stuff on Hacker News?

~~~
jff
Damn, you beat me to the post. I've been attempting to do it manually by
upvoting all non-Swartz posts.

~~~
meaty
I tried that as well to no avail. Downvoting people who keep going on about it
seems to work though.

------
mmahemoff
I've been wanting this for a different reason than information overload: to
hide spoilers. Whether for TV shows, movies, or sports, it's easy to come
across a result you'd rather discover later on, and one shouldn't have to
switch off all channels just to avoid coming across it. This affected a lot of
Americans suffering under NBC's delayed Olympic coverage.

I see this tech being relatively dumb at first and saving you seeing results
for a fresh event, but over time, becoming smart enough to, for example,
automatically adding spoiler alerts for an old movie you haven't yet seen.

------
Giszmo
Muting … can only be the first step.

I don't want to mute Aaron Swartz because I'm sick of hearing about him but I
want to tell my computer that I know of the fact that he died. I also read his
wikipedia article.

My computer now should know what facts I know to not bother me with them or
even better gray out paragraphs in longer articles when these paragraphs only
contain stuff I know.

To teach a computer about what I know, I guess, some TLDR-interface would be
needed, where users can tag paragraphs and whole articles (or videos?) with
facts discussed in that article. Interested users could have edit wars about
the appropriate facts but I would just have to confirm if I read and
understood an article with some minimum interaction (slowly scrolling to the
end of the article or not clicking a headline link for example).

Better than with some temporary hype like CES, such a system could help to dig
deep into some more complex topic. I follow every news about my favorite
subject but it gets so annoying to read the same introductions to my subject
over and over again. I want to skip that part without missing the news. I want
to skip the old news without missing the twist they found on that old news. A
tool that could help with that would save the majority of users a lot of time.
Of course people that profit from such a system would also have a high
incentive to tag paragraphs, too, which should not cost too much time neither.
Some day hopefully computers can do the tagging part.

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yolesaber
A possible impediment to company support for this would be the rise in
sponsored / promoted posts used by apps such as Twitter and Facebook. Users
might want to be muting things that appear in these advertisements and if a
company makes these un-mutable then you have user satisfaction going down.

Of course this a concession users might have to make in order to reap the
benefits of such a system. It is a good idea, though dubious it is the
'future' of the internet especially since it exists in a self-contained
platform that is opt-in by its nature.

~~~
ufuk
I would assume any brand with an ounce of wits would not choose to spend time
and money trying to reach users who have explicitly stated that they have no
interest in the topic. Especially when there always is a whole bunch out there
how are clamoring for said topic.

Still, I must confess there are many brands who have yet to reach this level
of understanding, but that doesn't mean services would necessarily choose to
enable those types.

------
kine
FWIW, this post was written long before the tragic events of Aaron Swartz and
is not intended to be about this tragedy.

Thoughts and condolences to his family, friends and peers who loved him so
much.

------
craigpatik
Muting is heavy-handed and only half of the issue. When you mute you often
block out content that you do want to see. The other half is promoting the
content that interests you so it rises above the rest.

Once you've defined what you like and dislike in a nuanced way, you can adjust
your signal-to-noise ratio on the fly. See also: <http://signaltonoi.se/>
(disclaimer: my app, and not yet available.)

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hayksaakian
Muting is anti-growth. You're methodically reducing the content users may be
exposed to.

The only benefit I could see is counter intuitive. People follow/friend people
they have no intention of paying attention to, so maybe this is a socially
acceptable way to ignore them.

------
adpirz
And the filter bubble continues...
[http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...](http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html)

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phponrails
Next big era? IRC had muting, banning, ignore, moderated discussion, voiced
and unvoiced, ops only, password-protected rooms, etc. like decades ago.

Twitter should hire Khaled Mardam Bey and stfu

~~~
vidarh
But IRC is a single type of service. The point is not that muting has not
existed for a long time - it has, in many variations. The point is that we're
reaching a point where the information flow is so great that managing muting
across services is a massive time drain in itself.

If I don't want to hear about sports, I can filter out all kinds of stuff
about sport in many services, but I need to do it manually in each one. I
chose that as an example, because it is real for me: I don't care much about
sport. Yet "every" news aggregator service etc. I might care to sign up for
automatically assumes that I will care. So when I downloaded Google Currents
to my phone, for example, it automatically pulls down a bunch of sports news I
don't want.

Muting in this context is "filtering as a service". The ability to pay someone
(whether with my eyeballs or cash) to keep track of what I like and what I
don't like and ensure that when I sign up to new services I don't have to
configure each and every one to exclude the information I have no interest in
(or more positively, to tell them what I do care about deeply so they
prioritize that).

