Thanks for the update, highly informative and thoughtful as usual.

I apologize if this subject has become tiresome, but I would like to mention that my proposal did not make it into your recap and the negatives you mention don't seem to apply.

The idea is to let anyone comment wherever they like, and people can simply choose not to see comments from users they don't care for. The affected user need not even know that anything changed.

This, I think, solves a lot of issues.

Preventing someone from commenting is like painting over graffiti: it motivates more. Much better to leave the graffiti on the wall, where people who like graffiti can see it, but make it invisible to people who don't like it.

Muting currently works on the fairly arbitrary basis of which user happens to post an article. None of us browse Hubski exclusively on our own posts, so we are all dependent on other users having similar moderation preferences (and many users never mute anyone). Probably we spend more time on the posts of others, so for the majority of the time our mute settings are ineffective.

For lurking users or people who only comment, the current mute option is completely useless.

The worst consequence I can think of is that there will sometimes be a little gap in the discussion where I see some comments, then a hidden comment from someone I don't like, then more comments. This sounds like an ideal outcome, but if I do want to see the complete conversation a single click on the hidden comment makes it visible {demo}.

Even the worst-case-scenario of a determined "dickwad" commenter is not intolerable. One click hides all the offending comments from me, everywhere, but the troll is none the wiser, making it far easier for me to follow the ignore-and-do-not-feed rule.