You can now quietly remove Twitter followers

Up to now, the only way to remove a Twitter follower from following your account was to give them the ol' block, which not only got rid of them from your follower list, but also rendered your account invisible to them in the future. That way, if a blocked person ever tried to look you up after realizing they are no longer seeing your Tweets on their feed, they would know for sure you've blocked them after they are unable to find you.

And as we all know, blocking someone on Twitter is a serious and irretractable statement of hostility, which is sure to put a wedge between you and the other party, even if things were only tepid between you previously. 

Now, the new ability to "soft block" any of your followers on Twitter is a welcome way to gently edge people away from your preferred circle without going on the offense, and without them necessarily finding out that you even did so.

If you remove someone from following you using this new method, they won't get a notification that they are no longer following you. They'll just stop seeing your future Tweets in their personal feed from then on—and if you weren't someone important to them already, they likely won't even notice. Of course, you won't be able to see what they post on Twitter, either.

The downside of this is that if a "soft-blocked" person does figure out that they are no longer following you, they could simply just follow you again (upon which you'd see a notification, of course). Worst case scenario, this could potentially turn into an ongoing back-and-forth follow battle, until you get fed up enough to full-on perma-block them.

In other news, one more Twitter update that's currently in the works is a new "heads-up" warning feature that pops up whenever a Twitter conversation starts to get heated. The social media platform has announced that this feature could be useful to help you determine the "vibe" of a conversation before you decide to jump in. It also reminds you to communicate with respect, even in the heat of the moment.