Personally, ignore is a great feature, as is hush. But mute is straight-out censorship, and is both ineffective and prone to abuse.

(Ineffective because someone can always create a throwaway account, prone to abuse because someone can censor any response to their post)

To put it simply: I personally believe it's fine for person B to refuse to allow person A to talk to them, but not for person C to refuse to allow person A to talk to person B.

In principle, I am for this change. (I don't like the removal of calories from fat, but that is another matter.)

In practice, it's (worse than, arguably) useless. Because: How do you define added sugar? Is adding concentrated grape juice, for example, considered "added sugar"? Dehydrated apples? Sorghum syrup? Corn syrup? High-fructose corn syrup?

No matter how you define added sugar you'll both end up pushing people away from "good" products, and not pushing them away from many of the products that this is intended to push people away from. The large businesses have the money and the reasons to try to find alternatives that are not classified as added sugar. They'd find alternatives that are essentially equivalent but are not classified as such. Whereas smaller businesses will not be able to. Speaking in generalities here, but that is what I'll predict will happen if/when this change goes through.

That is disappointing.

Muting is not an analog to what you're describing here.

That is, unless you start demanding that random people on the street not converse with the person you don't like.

I much prefer physical books when I can.

That being said, I read relatively quickly, and carrying around an ebook reader is a lot easier than carrying around multiple books.

Sometimes the person doing the muting is being childish, sometimes the person being muted is being childish, and sometimes both are. But it's all subjective.

What should be done if half the people think that the person doing the muting is obviously wrong and should apologize, and half the people think that the person being muted is obviously wrong and should apologize?

There is no good answer to that, under the current mute system.

Splitting the discussion in half doesn't scale, among worse problems. Not commenting... Well, that basically ends up with "the poweruser is king" (as they tend to be the people posting) - and if you need evidence that that has problems, look at StackOverflow.

Effectively, mute ends up making the site turn into a bunch of echo chambers that don't ever communicate with each other.

And as such, I do not believe that the censorship portion of muting should exist.

Mute should be the comment equivalent of ignore, and no more. You don't see the comments of a user you ignore, but other people do.

Exactly.

Just because person A muted person B doesn't automatically mean that person B did something wrong to person A.

For the record, that is my preferred solution to the problem.

Shouldn't isn't the same thing as won't, though.

Just in my brief experience on Hubski I've seen multiple cases of people being muted where I do not believe the person who was muted should be obliged to apologize.

I have zero users muted. I am vocally against it, and I do not believe it is a good thing to use a feature you do not believe should exist. Hypocritical.

As for who am I? I would prefer not to say. Suffice to say I have accounts on Reddit (although I've basically given up with Reddit), Slashdot (yes, still), Hacker News, the XKCD forums, the Bay12 forums, KSP forums... And all are different usernames. Hence, "Yet Another Account".

Ah ok.

That's pretty much in line with how I wished things worked.

Or alternatively, a way to highlight comments made after you last visited the post / dim comments made before you last visited the post.

Might be space-intensive server-side, though.

Peoples burning desire to talk to someone who doesn't want to talk to them mystifies me.

Except that's not the case. It's more along the lines of "people's desire to have a conversation with anyone based around what someone who didn't want to talk to them said".

What is the difference between ignore and mute, in that case?

Personally, I wish it was hush / ignore comments / ignore posts, and no mute "feature" at all.

Agreed.

I quite like the idea of being able to ignore/hush users for yourself.

But being able to censor other people is taking things too far, personally. It's too open to abuse.

For example: posting a scathing reply to someone and then immediately muting them.

And it doesn't even work at its intended purpose - indeed it cannot work for its intended purpose. Because someone can always create a throwaway account and post the response.

Well, not quite self-promotion as of yet, because I'm still working on it, but here goes.

I am trying to introduce myself to integer linear programming by making a Nonogram solver using Python and puLP.

I've gotten it to solve 25x25 puzzles, now I just need to tidy it up and optimize it a "little" (for one thing, it currently takes a couple minutes just to generate the constraints on larger puzzles).

Other than migraines I've never had too much of an issue. Never even broken a bone.

Well, I have had a few other things. Something that wasn't strep throat but might as well have been (so the doctor said) that caused enough pain that I had to get a codeine-based cough syrup so I could swallow. And appendicitis. But nothing tops migraines.

Mine? Anxiety, I guess? Or rather...

I have... issues... making decisions. Or rather, I have issues classifying the importance of decisions. Choosing where to go to University for me was easier than figuring out what to do for supper.

If I know something is important, a) people don't tend to rush me on it and b) it tends to be something where there are clear differences between the options, and a clear way of judging what option is best. But when it's something that is probably not important, but needs to be decided in a timely manner... Issues ensue. Of the looking shellshocked variety.

So, with something like choosing where to go to University? I can sit down and go over all the options, compare, and eliminate options until I get to the choice that was the best for me at the time. And even if it doesn't work out it's not the end of the world, as my decision was justified at the time - worse comes to worse I know what I missed last time.

But with something like "What shall we have for supper"... I get paralyzed. Too many options, and no clear value function - no clear way to judge what is better, no clear way to justify my choice. And something that probably isn't important, but there's that nagging "what if". What if there was something in the fridge that needed to be used up. What if I add something to supper that makes it awful. What if I mess up cooking something and someone gets sick. Etc.

Although, amusingly enough, I have no issues with baking. Probably because with baking you're expected to (mostly) follow a recipe, and you're expected to have everything in the house. Same reason why I don't have much of an issue with following a recipe that someone has picked out.

(I'm focusing on cooking here, but it's not just cooking. That's just the first example that comes to mind.)

I meant don't run Javascript by default (NoScript, HTTPStatusboard, any of a number of options for doing this) - AdBlock only blocks based on a blacklist, which makes it useless against a lot of things.

It's like purely virus database-based antivirus. It will protect you against old exploits, hopefully, but it won't do anything against a zeroday.

Or, alternatively, just don't run the Javascript in the first place.

Or occasionally, the lurkers lurk because a poweruser on the site has blocked them which means that it is hard for them to comment on things.

If you're at a party and you demand that no-one speak to the person you don't like, that's not exactly reasonable.

That's why it didn't do anything. Thanks.

Not just you.

Have a showdead option in the users profile.

Off -> don't display any of the tree.

On -> display the full tree, but with any comments by the muted user in a font color with less contrast

Can they remove your first comment? Can't you just edit it and add "Thanks for muting me so I can't respond"?

I don't know. If you can edit it, a) that doesn't affect any other comments / posts later (especially if they are a power user), and b) that means that mute is even less effective for its stated purpose.

when mute is being abused.

This is (strongly) subjective. What one person believes to be a perfectly valid reason to mute someone another will strongly believe is not a valid reason to mute them, and wants to respond to them.

as long as there is a easy way to find discussion forks, I don't see it as being inherently worse.

Reposting on mute does not scale

And, even besides that issue, there isn't an easy way to find discussion forks. Especially when it's a fork off of a comment as opposed to a fork off of a post. And if one was created, then you've just reimplemented "mute as ignore for comments", only clunkier, and more prone to fragmenting the community.

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

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.

And if/when you get muted for a difference in beliefs? Should one apologize for having a different opinion than another?

Works for me.

Naming things is a hard problem, and one I personally don't even try to figure out.

How something is supposed to be used is not the same thing as what it is capable of being used for. As you say: "I think some people are using mute the way I would use hush.".

And the mute function, as it is currently implemented, is too open to abuse.

Duplicate posts for a link doesn't really help, as that doesn't scale: if person A posts an article, and person B is muted by person A and so creates a new post, and person C is muted by person B and so creates a new post... You'd end up getting to a point with enough users that people cannot look at all discussions of a particular link. Not to mention that that only helps with discussions of the link itself, as opposed to people trying to reply to someone within the discussion.

My two cents? Adding tools to help people do what they are already able to do is great. Adding tools to enable people to censor other people is not. So. Keep hush and ignore feature as-is, but change mute to only prevent you from seeing their comments.

Now, that being said, a way to flag posts for admin/mod attention would help.