The First Cut

You are on Twitter and someone is annoying you. Not trolling, or being deliberately offensive to anyone in particular, just annoying. You know the ones, they pick a subject and won't let it lie, they choose to relay a 140 character missive over eight tweets

like

this

and you see the one that says "this" first, and have to check their feed to find out what "this" refers to and it turns out it's only "or that". That. It doesn't matter how they annoy you, they annoy you, so they have to go from your timeline or you'll have to read that book you got for Christmas or tidy up instead of going on Twitter. There are ways to do this.

1. Muting. This is a relatively new thing on Twitter (I'm always late to this stuff, you're putting quoted tweets in little boxes now, so each tweet has a subsection attached which has to be read before/after the one you're doing and it means the 140 character limit which makes Twitter such fun to deal with is blown out the window stop it now!), where was I? Oh yes, muting.

Muting is the stupidest, lamest, lilly-livered way of removing arseholes from your timeline.

"I can't stand what that guy's saying and he holds no interest for me whatsoever, but instead of walking away from him I'll carry on standing next to him, but I'll cover my ears up."
No-one, ever.

Then there's 2. Blocking. I've read some very sensible pieces on blocking as The Way Forward®, and it is a very logical solution. With one swipe the dick is erased from your Twitter experience. Okay, you might see him (and let us not be coy here, it is nearly always a him) and his @ mentioned in one of those group conversations, the subject of which you have no idea because some of the people involved are in locked accounts and others have blocked you... where was I? Blocking is the scientific, clean, fair way to get rid of him. He will just see his follower/followee numbers reduced by one and think another spam bot has been reported. You never interacted with him, nor he with you. No problem, move on.

But wait. You want him to know that you've blocked him, don't you? If you block you've let him off scot-free for moaning all day about lame celebrities and then bragging about his article in the paper that's really, really lame AND FULL OF TYPOS TOO. He might, at some point in the future, click on your @ thinking: "Didn't that guy follow me once?", only to discover the terrible truth. This would be sweet: he'd sit back in his armchair, reach for the brandy and realise someone out there doesn't think he's the absolute arbiter of taste he thinks he is. Sweet indeed, but there is no way of guaranteeing this will happen, and sitting in your armchair waiting for it to possibly happen will be a much more stressful and unrewarding experience than the one he might have to go through.

Then there's 3. Soft-blocking. For those at the back, this is where you block then immediately unblock, a sort of "my mistake for following in the first place, sorry". There is no place for soft-blocking in this particular story.

And finally there's 4. Unfollowing. Aha, didn't see that one coming did you? I now believe that good old-fashioned unfollowing is the deepest cut of all. Why? Because I guarantee that the stain in question checks who is unfollowing him on a weekly, daily, perhaps minutely basis. Of course he is, imagine the embarrassment of him exchanging dull pleasantries with a minor celebrity who has a few more followers than him, only to find that they ditched him months ago. He can't take that risk. So unfollow, and soon enough he'll be doing that armchair/brandy thing and mwahahahah etc.

But don't delay, best if it were done quickly, lest you find he gets in first and does you.