#oneaday Day 219: A Handy Tip To Make Twitter More Bearable

I was thinking recently about what, exactly, made Twitter annoying to participate in, and I came to the conclusion that one of the biggest problems was the Retweet function.

The reason for this is that the Retweet function causes stuff to be thrown into your feed that you didn't ask for. More often than not, people will retweet deliberately contentious stuff so that they can get into an argument with someone and win Internet Points for saying "the right things" for whatever group they're trying to impress.

You can turn off retweets on Twitter, but you have to do so for each individual person you follow; there didn't seem to be a blanket means of simply turning off retweets altogether.

However, I refused to believe that no-one out there had ever thought it might be nice to cut down on this particular source of noise, so I did a bit of investigating. And I found the first helpful Lifehacker article I've ever seen — not only that, but the actual advice in this one is probably the first time a Lifehacker article can be vaguely accurately described as a "hack" in the programming sense.

Lifehacker is a Gawker publication, so I don't really want to give them any traffic. As such, I'll share the tip with you right here and you can enjoy it without supporting the Gawker machine.

You need to be using Chrome to do this… I think, anyway. In theory any browser with a developer console that can execute instructions in immediate mode should work, but Chrome definitely works.

Step 1: Go to your Twitter following page at https://twitter.com/following

Step 2: Wait for all the profiles to load. This can take a little while if you follow a lot of people. Scroll down the page to verify everything has loaded.

Step 3: Hit F12 to open the Developer Console. Down towards the bottom of this panel, click the "Console" option.

Step 4: Copy and paste this code into the console window and hit Return.

a=Array.prototype.slice.call(document.querySelectorAll("div.ProfileCard-content div.dropdown"));a.forEach(function(e) {e.querySelector("button").click(); e.querySelector("li.retweet-off-text button").click(); }) 

Like the loading of profiles, this will also take a moment. When it finishes, retweets will be turned off for everyone you follow, so you can then selectively re-enable if there are those you do want to see retweets from. Or just leave them turned off altogether and enjoy the novelty of a timeline that sometimes stays completely silent for five minutes or more at a time! Bliss.

While you're on, if you haven't already, also mute the words  suggest_recycled_tweet_inline and suggest_activity_tweet in your account settings to stop seeing other people's Likes on your timeline.

And with that, Twitter is (mostly) usable again! Enjoy!