That's a useful option. Sometimes the stream from a user just gets too busy with chatter about topics that are of no interest.
Some users of the company's iOS and Android clients are now seeing an option to mute accounts that they follow, preventing another user's tweets and retweets from appearing in their timeline. The user remains muted until you manually unmute them. In essence, then, the mute feature works as a kind of stealth unfollow — you won't be seeing another person's tweets, but they won't know that.Reports Of Twitter Experimenting With Mute Feature On Android and iOS [theverge.com]