On his posts, and his alone.

Ahhh, there's a point of difference. Ownership! You have a very defined sense of ownership - I suspect it's pretty obvious to you who owns what. I think it's pretty clear to you that the original poster owns their post.

But my concept is... much muddier, much harder to pin down. As an example, I couldn't even tell you who owns my house. I have a certain level of interest in it. So does the bank. So do the rest of the people living in it. So do my neighbors, and so does the city as a whole. When I make decisions, I try to balance the wants and needs of all of these groups.

But just like I couldn't tell you who owns the house, I couldn't tell you who ought to own a post. Clearly the original poster has some interest in it, since he took the time to post it. But then it flies out into the community, and the community adds content to it, votes on it, etc. By the time all this is done... Who has majority ownership? It's likely that the time spent working on it by the community outweighs the time spent by the original poster.

Don't like his curation? Don't follow him. Don't like the fact that some people can't comment on his posts?

A certain amount of curation is good - Put the posts largely thought good near the top, allow the rest to drop down.

But here we're talking about something else. Here, a single person gets to pick and choose what I get to read. I don't want that from anyone. Doesn't matter if I agree or disagree with them, like or hate them as a person, or whatever. I want to hear what people besides that one person have to say. That's why I'm on a site that allows comments!

Oh, and the PM thing is silly - I have no such list, and even if I did, it doesn't allow others to chime in after the muted people make their points, or allow upvoting, or any of the nice hubski features which helped bring me here.

translation: "God, I really don't like your metaphors, and so I'm choosing to believe they reflect on your character" ???

Hey, more words in my mouth! They're tasty, but I'm a bit of a picky eater - Mind if we leave 'em on the plate in the future, so I can just pick out the ones I agree with?

Klein's urine metaphor didn't make a huge amount of sense to me. We're talking about something whose value is widely disagreed on by many people, but urine is almost universally reviled. Maybe graffiti art would have been a more apt metaphor. So you're right in that I didn't much like his metaphor : )

But when I say I'm not sure if it reflects well, I really do mean that - I can see a multitude of reasons for choosing urine for free speech. Some are innocuous, but most are less so.

For example, maybe he just sucks at choosing metaphors - That's pretty innocuous.

Or maybe he could revile the concept of speech uncurated by himself. That'd be a pretty unpleasant opinion. Perhaps he thinks that what he reviles is universally reviled - That at least shows a certain inability to think outside the box. Or, a small step better than that, perhaps he thinks what he finds disgusting matches up exactly with some other subset of humans, who will follow him.

But the truth is likely to be more muddled, a confusing morass containing bits of each of those, and many more I couldn't think of.

So yeah, I'm not sure!

Make your own damn post.

Well, ok, but since I have a problem with all mutings, I guess I'd have to copy and link every piece of content that comes along. That seems like a lot of repetitive work - Maybe we should set up a bot for that.

Oh, but a bot seems silly, when we have a responsive site dev. Maybe we could have him stick the muted comments on a separate page, and link them from the main page.

Oh, but that still doesn't allow muted comments to be made easily in response to other people's comments. Maybe we should just hide muted comments by default, and allow each user to switch them on and off at will.

Oh, shucks, we've just arrived at wasoxygen's suggestion!

Cheers!