There’s this festival in Austin called SXSW, you heard of it?
South by Southwest is a mammoth festival-conference mutant, and somehow that combo works really well.
Like, it’s been around for over 30 years, gets bigger every year, and in 2016 it drew in 57,846 conference participants, 144,551 festival-goers, and a whopping $325.30 million for the Austin, TX economy – that kind of working well.
SouthBy is the word
SXSW starts March 10, which is a means that if you don’t already have your badge, which you basically have to buy nearly a year in advance, you probably aren’t going.
But if you’re in the tech industry, film industry, music industry, gaming industry, or you just generally run with people who go to a lot of conferences and festivals (I told you there was a lot going on here – that’s not even all of it, seriously), you’ll be hearing a LOT about SXSW in the near future.
Your Twitter feed, in particular, will likely be taken over by an overwhelming, collective gush of #southby fandom, including ignorant claims of finding the “best taco ever.”
(That taco lives in a truck without wheels, which rests in a vacant lot at a location I will not disclose, because I’m not convinced the world deserves such beauty.)
Silencing the SouthBy
If you’re sad and bitter about your #southby exclusion, or you just don’t want to spend the next ten days scrolling through tweets about barbecue, breakfast tacos, and free booze-fueled networking, there is hope.
You can cleanse your Twitter palate of any SXSW with one simple tool.
Tweetfilter
It’s a straightforward browser extension that works on anything from Chrome, to Safari, to Opera – and even Internet Explorer. But if you’re using Internet Explorer, you probably don’t have to worry about your Twitter feed.
This extension lets you filter out given hashtags and tweet content, and if you psychically know the opening line of all SXSW tweets (Drank? Drought? Dragons? Your guess is as good as mine.), you can even filter by first word.
In years past, we’ve written about a handy little extension called “Not at SXSW,” but unfortunately for the extremists in the audience, it’s no longer around.
This tool literally hid all tweets from anyone at SXSW, and any random tweets with southby hashtags, but now it’s no more.
[clickToTweet tweet=”You could unfollow your least favorite people of the week and refollow them after SXSW. ” quote=”If you’re truly desperate to avoid any mention of panels, afterparties, and pedicabs, you could take a hard line by unfollowing your least favorite people of the week, and refollowing them when they return to being normal humans in your eyes.”]
Otherwise, the SXSW-FOMO experience could help you grow as a person, by heading to Austin for next year’s 10-day onslaught.
#STHUSXSW
