The annoyances of Twitter notifications you can’t turn off

Twitter can be such a useful platform to get your message out there. It’s simple, straight to the point, and prevents you from getting too wordy. However, when it comes to matching you with the information you care to read about, things aren’t so friendly.

One of the biggest drags surrounding Twitter is the constant notifications you get hit with. Clearly, if you follow someone on Twitter, you likely are interested in the things they talk about or share with the world. You just can’t really control how this information reaches you. Some may prefer to manually scan the timeline of posts and some enjoy keeping things clean (and everything in between).

It’s actually quite surprising how very little control you have over the content that is blasted out to you every day. Not just to your notifications on the site but to your phone’s notification center/area as well. This person tweeted, that person tweeted, click here, click here. And then came the fleets, just to throw something else in the basket of things coming at you.

Some platforms allow for a lot of customization when it comes to various notifications, but not Twitter. You look for a settings option that yields some relief and get excited when you see “notifications”. However, when you click on it, you are led to options that dance around it or offer odd filter options. Like “people who don’t have a picture” or “who don’t follow you back” or “don’t have a confirmed phone number”. Nothing as straightforward and effective as “disable all Fleet notifications”. The “quality filter” option seems to be a mean joke as it doesn’t really improve anything. It claims to apply focus to those users you have interacted with recently. However, you are still littered with notifications from accounts you hardly ever interact with.

We have seen some chatter, including within the office here, about the interest in disabling certain “types” of notifications. This would greatly filter out the things you don’t want to see so that you can just focus on the things you do. Maybe you only want to get notifications on your phone when you are (@) mentioned on Twitter. Maybe you don’t care about “Fleets”. Maybe you want to be able to “choose” the people you want to get notifications about (starting with nobody) and save the rest for when you are manually browsing.

Now, they do give you the option to do the complete opposite of that last part. You can’t manually choose who you want to see notifications about, but you can choose who you don’t by muting them one by one. However, this means you are going to have a LOT of clicking to do and you have to do it twice for the fleets for some reason (mute them, then stop their fleets). It’s like a game of wack-a-mole with a prize of “peace and quiet” if you win.

It seems as though Twitter wants to cram as much information down your eye sockets as they can. while making it quite difficult and time-consuming to dial things back (if you so choose to do so). You can apply filters, but they aren’t the most useful filters and you can tell they do this on purpose.

So if you have ever dove into your settings hoping to find a solution and wondered why that solution seems to be missing. Don’t worry, you aren’t alone.