While I fully agree with the drive to add more user-specific customization to comments, I'm not convinced stripping the hush from the ignore and mute is going to work. Preferably, if you want to get rid of someone, there should be two options: the Get Out of the Way option and the Get Out of my Sight option. Which is kinda what we have now, I think: it's quite difficult to guess the exact workings of the three functionalities. But one option would be to reduce a user's visibility, the other to remove it. I see no reason to have a third option. It is difficult, but if you have to do everything yourself it soon becomes something that requires upkeep. I don't want to have the RES-effect, that if I don't keep up, my comment section will be horrible. Maybe it is possible to have some automated comment sorting based on previous interactions, and give the user the ability to nudge it back down or further up. It's a ranking after all, and in the end it's just a numbers game. Difficult, but not impossible. Maybe just greying out the comment? I don't know, I'd just like some visual feedback that a comment is being moved because of my actions. Also, if we ever get to name a sleeping pill / liquor, it shall be named hushski.Automating is very difficult, because you will always create an artificial bias based on your assumptions and limited knowledge.
Highlighting their status might work against the functionality.
Ideally, it would be great if the option to filter your feed mapped well on to comment curation. But, I don't think that is the case. Ignore actually exists primarily because people can follow tags. If you only follow people, it's fairly easy to limit your exposure to a user by who you follow. However, if you follow a tag, ignore is the only way to avoid a specific user that posts with that tag. Mute is designed primarily so that users can protect their own posts against abusive comments. Biasing the comment sort is fairly distinct from these functions. There may be some overlap with these functions and Hush, however, although ignore and mute currently bias the comment sort, I have never used them for that effect, since their primary effect is much more consequential. At any rate, it will be an experiment. We can run it for a while, and see how people feel about it, and how it might be changed or improved.