How To: Mute People on Twitter

@helsyflores

Most of us probably follow people on Twitter that totally get on our nerves, or whose tweets are just not that interesting. But we can’t unfollow them because they’re friends or your boss or whatever. During these times, you’ve probably wished you could just mute them. You know? Make their tweets disappear from your sight, without having to unfollow them. Well, our prayers have been answered. Twitter launched a new feature this past Monday called mute, and here are all the specs.

The mute button is a new feature that works on Android and iOS. According to Twitter, “Mute gives you even more control over the content you see on Twitter by letting you remove a user’s content from key parts of your Twitter experience.” Muting a user means that their tweets and retweets will no longer appear on your timeline, but you’ll still be following them. So basically they become invisible, but they can still favorite, retweet and reply to your tweets. They won’t know you muted them and you can mute and unmute whenever you want.

HOW TO MUTE

Muting is very simple. From your timeline, simply select one of the person’s tweet and tap on the three dots, then “Mute @username”. You can also go to their profile, tap on the gear and then “Mute @username”. (Coldplay was used for demonstration purposes, I would never mute them.)

So there you have it. No more sitting through a bazillion tweets of self-declared experts during sports events or awards. Or depressed tweets after a friend’s breakup. But careful, this is a double-edged sword: you might just get muted too! Suppose, by someone you were trying to impress. And now they’ll never read your tweets. What a tragedy!

This feature will be available to everyone in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

How To: See Who’s Unfollowed You on Twitter and Instagram

@helsyflores

You go into your Twitter and (if you’re a total creep) you notice you have one less follower. Whatever, I don’t care. We are free human beings. People can unfollow me if that’s what they want. Their loss, right? And you go on with your day. But curiosity corrodes your soul, and 1 minute later: OKAY, WHO WAS IT?! Or maybe you’re a community manager and need to know when important accounts follow you, among other things.

As a social media enthusiast, I’ve gone through every app and website that let’s you know just who was that person who unfollowed you. Mainly because these apps provide other tools, such as knowing which verified accounts you’re not following back. Around two years ago, someone told me Shay Mitchell from Pretty Little Liars had unfollowed one of my accounts; of course, I didn’t even know she was following me and so I wasn’t following her back, which is probably the reason she unfollowed me.

So, here are the best places to see who’s unfollowed you, and more.

TWITTER

I started with who.unfollowed.me and friendorfollow.com, but after one of my accounts reached more than a certain amount of followers, these could no longer display results for me. Then I found Unfollowers. I can’t describe how cool this app is. First of all, it’s free. And second, it gives you many, many tools. Here are some things you can do with this app, followed by an explanation of the most important ones.

1. Recent Unfollowers. This function displays your unfollowers. It even lets you sort and filter them.

2. Fans. This option displays all those nice people who are following you, even though you’re not following them back. It’s exceptionally useful when you have many followers and you just can’t keep track of who follows you. You can sort them and filter them in infinite ways. For example, if you want to see if a verified account is following you, you can select “Verified only” on the corresponding drop-down menu. But there are also millions of accounts that are not verified and that still have thousands of followers; for these you use “Followers/Following”, under the “Sort by” menu. Now, you want to use the “Followers/Following” option and NOT the “Followers” option, because there are many accounts who have, let’s say, 90K followers… but because they’re following 89K. So 89K followers are only following because they followed them in the first place, and the remaining 1K are only there because they thought “Wow, this account has 90K followers! It must be super popular.” It’s shameful, but many accounts do this. They open a new “Common White Girl Problems” or “Love Quotes” account and go on a follow spree, and as soon as people follow back and they reach a good amount of followers, they unfollow everyone. (Oh my God, you’re so cool.) And some don’t unfollow them, they’re happy having 90K followers even though they follow 89K. Anyway, the Zombie Filter is also super cool. It takes into account all those people who only tweet mysterious, spam-looking tweets, and stuff of that sort.

 

3. Not following back. This option displays all those brats (just kidding) who are not following you back. You have the same sorting and filtering options as above.

4. Inactive Following, Fake Following, and No profile image. If you have OCD and like to keep everything in your life, including your Twitter, as neat as possible, this is for you. These three options are very similar and pretty much serve the same purpose: Who’s not worth following. Inactive following displays all the people you follow who haven’t tweeted in a long time. How long? You decide. The Fake Following option displays the profiles you follow who might not be actual people, aka bots. And as for the last option, we’ve all encountered the egg. These are all those people who created a profile, used it for 5 minutes, and forgot it forever; your dad, who even though he joined Twitter a year ago, still doesn’t know how to add a picture; bots; hipsters who think they’re super rebels by not posting a picture… you get it.

5. Send a welcome DM to new followers. 

As you can see, Unfollowers enables you to do many things. I can’t go over all of them, but you can head over there and experiment yourself.

INSTAGRAM

With Unfollowgram, you simply sign in and you can check who unfollowed you. It won’t work on your first visit, since it will have just made a register of the people who follow you. By your second visit it can review your actual followers and compare this list with the registry list. If it doesn’t work, reload by clicking where it says “Check” and a little arrow.

It also lets you know who’s not following you back and who you don’t follow back, just click on the corresponding tabs.

I would like to end this note (totally contradicting this article by) saying that having unfollowers or people not following you back does not define how cool you are, you’re still awesome! Stop stressing about insignificant things!

How To: See Profile Pictures of People You Don’t Have on Facebook

@helsyflores

Whether it’s our secret crush, the center of a gossip scandal, or a person we no longer have, we’ve all wanted to see a profile picture on Facebook and weren’t able to. Well, we’ve been able to all along, we just didn’t know it. Actually, you didn’t know it, I did. I’m gonna show you how in just three simple steps. Don’t worry, you don’t have to take your credit card out. You do, however, need to be using the coolest browser out there, aka Google Chrome. You can install it here.

Step 1: You go into the person’s profile and realize you can’t see their current profile picture.

Step 2: Go to the Chrome app store and download Photo Zoom for Facebook.

Step 3: Now go into any Facebook profile. You’ll notice a new icon has appeared where the Chat tab is, on the right inferior corner. Now all you have to do is place your cursor on their picture, and there you have it! You can now see any current profile picture there is! This extension also let’s you see any picture on Facebook without having to click on it.

So there you go, loves! Have fun stalking Facebooking!

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