Show HN: Mute.vc – Mute Investors on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mute.vc – Mute Investors on Twitter

mute.vc

100 pointsmeagher51 comments

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!

who is this person I should follow?

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).

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.

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.

I’d love it if there was the equivalent for this, but for politics.

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.

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.

127.0.0.1 twitter.com

127.0.0.1 www.twitter.com

There's a bunch of caching and whatnot that browsers do now, you may need to have your browser forget the site then try again after adding it.

In Firefox for example you can right click a site in history and click "Forget this site" which will reset all of the caches that keeps it working

I used https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/a....

Check the bottom of the list for the social ones.

Edit: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts repo link.

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".

Sure, you can choose a version that only blocks ads and social if you want, if you look at the original github repo. The ad blocking list should be fairly reasonable to anyone.

You might want to use a better example than the brain trust over at Project Veritas.

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?)

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

I had the same issue. Seems to finally work when I clear my cache.

Maybe Twitter is running a webworker?

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".

Seems there are some screenshots on github that show a list of people with options to mute/unmute individually or in bulk.

https://github.com/tmm/mute.vc/tree/master/.github/screensho...

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.

>report accounts for you

Wait, what kind of use-case is there for this?

Any app that displays tweets outside of Twitter, e.g. Tweetbot.

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

Feature request: Mute.politics please.

Isn't everything politics in some form or another?

No.

Only if you have a terrible worldview.

Looks like the list of investors is here: 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What tech stack are you using for this?

Edit nvm found it at the footer:

https://github.com/tmm/mute.vc

Same thought. I assume it's pre-made lists of people who spam or get retweeted by the people they fund?

Why not just use a block list[0]?

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2015/sharing-block-lists-to...

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).

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

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.

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).

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

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?

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.

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

i see a bunch of tweets from folks i don't follow through retweets and (more commonly now) favorites. this let's me switch that on and off.

overall, this was a little hack that everyone i talked to thought was funny.

Oh, I didn't think about retweets. That explains it.

(I wonder if it should reflect on the retweeter, positively or negatively).

will this mute filtering the twitter connector for feedly?

I hope this ushers in a new cultural moment!

> 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.

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 :)

You think they meant js vs assembly? Perhaps the better read would be that they meant js vs clicking on each profile and hitting mute/unmute?

It’s fast coz the cpu be blazing ;)

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