How will this part be implemented? You’d have to have a mod read and tag every post.
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Filtering posts by content is frigging hard. A script would need to read the content of each post, then remove the post parent article if something in the array triggered it. You’re welcome to make the feature… at the end of the day muting people is faster and easier.
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I gave the example of web searches. How does anybody find anything? Words weighted and parsed for common usage patterns? What I was getting at is that the more positive approach might be filtering posts based upon their actual content, rather than making personality conflicts the main issue. My guess is that it is better done on the server side. Filtering by user name sounds about as reliable as filtering by zodiac sign.
When the purpose is to bring relief to the presser, I think it serves the purpose well enough. God knows it would be really awkward here if I always had to see my ex’s posts.
EDIT:
Interesting link. https://meta.discourse.org/t/always-anonymous-categories-plugin/41110
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Ketchup on hot dogs? The horror! The horror! 
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There’s some overlap. Imagine, if you will, a community member “A” with a long posting history. Imagine another user, “B,” who has had occasion to read a great many of user A’s posts, and eventually formed an opinion about the quality of those posts, the relevance to B’s intended use-case of the forum, the degree of merit any user may or may not find in other people’s writings, and the amount of time B wants to spend reading such posts. Suppose after years of reading hundreds or even thousands of A’s posts, B has eventually come to feel that A’s posts pretty reliably give B the impression that A is, not to put too fine a point on it, full of shit.
I myself have a couple of As I could name. Maybe I’ll try muting them. Probably not, since nobody really bugs me all that much, and I can scroll right past the full-o’-shit posts awfully quick these days. But man is it easy for me to see why people don’t want to spend a lot of time engaging with folks who have demonstrated a chronic shit-fullness over the years. For them, the mute button is probably a small but worthwhile mercy.
I don’t follow Trump on Twitter either, and my life feels the richer for that lack.
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Ditto.
I doubt that I’ll actually use the mute feature, but there are a few folks that I tend to reflexively skip past unread. Ye Olde Max was the chief amongst those, once it became clear that he was not just stupid, but was acting in malicious bad faith.
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Have I missed something and we’ve had a troll invasion where the adding of this feature was made necessary or was this preemptively done?
Preemptive. I’ve seen what happens on places without a block tool. It ain’t pretty - and aim not talking just my breakup.
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That leads to a clbuttic problem at least as old as the Consbreastution that quickly becomes apparent even to those who didn’t graduate magna semen laude. 
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To be fair to Jeff, as opposed to how he went about communicating on that thread, I think he has a fundamental disagreement with the very idea of this feature. I’ve spoken to him about it before and I think, from what he said to me at the time, that it very much goes against the grain of how he sees Discourse working, which is his baby after all. If paying clients for his business were demanding it, he’d have to think more about whether he could do it but when it is just people on the Internet, especially people that come across sometimes as delicate flowers (deservedly or not), I don’t think he sees a need to budge on it. Since I think muting features, while having wanted them from time to time, are unhealthy for a social platform, I kind of agree. That said, I’m a cis het white dude who ran a BBS in the late 1980s with a bunch of mouthbreathers using modems, as well as being active on Usenet in the same era, so my idea of “acceptable discourse” or “conflict” is very much not in line with the current times.
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Can I have a swear filter that changes all occurrences of “fuck” and “shit” to “frack” and “dreck” instead?
not a real request
You mean the entirety of the Internet before, say, 2008, outside of email list filters? I ask this as an old fart who has been on the Internet since 1988 or 89.
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I’m not sure how I feel about this.
I was in favour of a block feature back on the bbs, but eventually came round to the view that if someone was being obnoxious, then they should be dealt with via moderation rather than be left to hang around and abuse and put off new members.
That said, what people are saying here is also valid. If there’s just that one person who you can’t get along with, but the rest of the board seems to like for some reason, then individual blocks can be a good thing.
However I also hope it doesn’t lead to unnecessary drama, because I also speculate that the people most likely to be blocked by others are also likely to react badly when they realise what has happened.
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If being muted, not banned but merely muted, causes them to react badly and cause drama, then it sure seems like the muting was justified.
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You can mute a thread, which does this.
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Okay, but you know who was the poster child of being obnoxious, but who would never be touched by moderation (except for a few “ease up there” nudges)? Jeff, on any given feminism post. The same guy who doesn’t want the Mute button in Discourse.
And why was he so obnoxious? Not because he broke the TOS. And certainly he contributed positively to technical topics (er, unless they also concerned feminism).
He was obnoxious because he ignored any poster replying to him who could readily be identified as a woman based on their posts’ overall contents. Meanwhile he spouted derailing, essentialist crap.
On feminism posts.
He’d be nigh-impossible to content filter, seeing as how he’d use the same key words and phrases everyone else was using.
But wait, isn’t ignoring women the same as muting them all?
Why yes.
But a mute makes it a lot harder for one obnoxious person to hijack a thread from 30 people. One obnoxious person can shut down threads by making it all about them if they’re obnoxious enough. Derailing is a way of curtailing expression.
It’s like showing up to a loud party with an air horn. You can tell the host, “hey, that person with the air horn is being really obnoxious” but they might say “sorry, the rest of the party is so loud we can’t throw them out just for being loud too”.
Now, I don’t feel the need to mute anyone.
But hell yes I’m glad the button is there now.
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What you’re not getting is this button is a filter for EMOTIONAL content, and it’s subjective (client side emotions), so stop trying to use rational judgement to figure out why people have strong feelings and respond to those… by muting people sometimes. That IS a positive approach, although it is one which allows ANY OF US to be negated without us knowing it. That’s life.
I’m pretty sure it won’t end the world or immenetize the eschaton.
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That’s remarkably close to a situation I’ve experienced in Real Life™.
I think the word you’re seeking is ‘covert aggression’. It’s that nasty form of passive aggression that isn’t obvious to those on the outside. But a mute button - a mute button is the only appropriate analogue to the real world answer to these people and their situations - which is either using technology to help me ignore them, or not letting the door hit my ass on the way out.
I prefer the mute feature. I can’t think of anyone here I’d like to use it on, but if Max ever shows up here…
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I think we had an exodus, when the adding of this feature (among others) was not done.
I believe this group crossed that rubicon some time ago.
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I think it only adds to unnecessary drama when it’s used as a cudgel, i.e., “Your ideas are stupid and you’re stupid! And now I’m blocking you!” to prevent any responses.
There are many situations in which various people have a bad day, go on a rant, start trolling people, maybe have a drink or two, and Become Dicks. A way to quietly silence that for your own sanity, even just for an evening until the steam boils off, can prevent a whole lot of potential conflict and escalation.
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