Old memes are Bill Murray, dodging them is Tilda Swinton

Twitter said Thursday it was hearing from users who saw too many topic suggestions in their home diaries and were preparing to remedy the situation. “We’re fixing this now and will continue to improve the topics and find ways to show you the best of Twitter.” The things you want to see is, is Tweeted support account. To its credit, Twitter has seemed more responsive to user complaints – or lack of interest – lately; In addition to Thursday’s topic announcement, Twitter said this week that it would kill Fleets, its fleeting, vanishing tweets that no one was apparently using.

But instead of showing us more of the stuff we want to see, I think Twitter should be looking at removing things we don’t want. I have a suggestion that I think most internet users will be able to fall behind – and we know the internet never collectively agrees on anything, so listen to me here: a way to block memes that have passed their expiration date.

This request is inspired by the memorialized photo of Wes Anderson, Timothée Chalamet, Tilda Swinton and Bill Murray from the Cannes Film Festival. It’s meant to promote their movie The French dispatch, but since we (the internet) have to ram everything funny into the ground and then dig it up and beat it some more, a version of that meme is now everywhere. Murray represents the “older” end of the spectrum, Swinton is the “cooler”, and so on. I won’t explain it to you too much. If you know, you know, and explaining memes is probably ridiculous. (I don’t know, I’m Generation X.)

Example:

I’ll refrain from arguing about the accuracy of the above (that’s correct), but you get the idea. Seriously, a “block image” feature would be extremely useful, and not just for reducing the number of annoying memes in our timelines. Twitter has a way of blocking “sensitive media,” but it would be great if there was a toggle for specific images – perhaps those that are potentially triggered for a given user but not necessarily broadly objectionable – rather than one. general blocking.

For now, you’ll just have to keep gritting your teeth through everyone’s “smart” holds on this worn-out meme; it’s a trending topic on Twitter right now. But it’s also starting to make the rounds on Facebook, which should be the agreed-upon sign that the meme is officially over and that we need something new and shiny to replace it.