Filtering social feeds. And Unwanted Content as a Feature or a Bug

Just a note on filtering out your social feed for unwanted things - like I tried to do to avoid spoilers of Star Wars.

I just wanted to temporarily mute posts from friends, etc, that used the words “Star Wars” or “Skywalker” for 24 hours. So that was a test for the various social nets.

Of course: the open source Mastodon Social network gave users the most control to filter out posts with certain key words, and for how long to block them. In my case two days.

Twitter gave OK permissions to “mute” but just basics, and only two settings – on or off.

And of course Facebook and YouTube gave me zero control whatsoever.

Social networks that are basically thinly disguised advertising engines simply have fundamentally different interests that their users do in things like filtering out unwanted content/noise etc.

The unwanted content in their eyes is a feature not a bug.