That doesn't help in the slightest for the case of "user responds to you then mutes you", among others.

Can they remove your first comment? Can't you just edit it and add "Thanks for muting me so I can't respond"? To anyone reading the thread, seeing the mute feature used in an aggressive way is a huge red flag. Being able to see when people are muted seems important, to understand what is going on in a thread. Certainly, there are assholes who deserve to be muted. We've all seen them. And certainly, there are assholes who will mute decent people who only want discussion. We just need a system that lets users differentiate between the two.

Also, reposting when you're muted a) doesn't scale and b) ends up being equivalent (if a lot clunkier than) making mute just the comment equivalent of ignore.

I agree, simple reposting doesn't seem like the best or most elegant solution. It obviously favors power users over sock puppets, but as long as there is a easy way to find discussion forks, I don't see it as being inherently worse.

Lets say in a hypothetical situation, some power user submits a news article about Generic Wasteful Government Project X and I really want to make an well written, researched and informed comment about it but can't because I was muted many months ago for an unrelated comment and they never responded to any of my "apologies" (unlikely, but could happen to someone). I would have to make my own post, with my comment on it. If it was a great comment, discussion could occur there, completely outside the ability of the original user to stifle or censor.

The way I see it, there are two issues that should be addressed. One, it should be as visible as possible to observers when mute is being abused. That user should have far fewer followers if abusive muting was apparent. And two, as long as outside observers can at least find discussions started by muted people, those doing the muting can't stop what is being discussed. There is no censorship, just a new discussion that people either feel worthy of sharing, or not. I suppose the issue might come up if a muted user just wants to make a short or snide comment about a post, but perhaps in those instances, when you're not bringing a comment worthy of discussion, it's probably best left unsaid. Hubski still seems pretty small, and I think it's hard to figure out what things will look like when/if the community grows much bigger. I'd hope that as the core group of power users grows, they become ideologically diverse and the site's features allow for transparency.