Whoa wait a minute. After seeing both of yours, and kbs comments, I had an idea. What if we had both. What if we had mute, but also an "ignore comments" feature? That way if I'm leaning more towards indifference I could just not see their comment, but if I'm in a situation with say, a certain someone, I don't want them commenting on my stuff at all and then bam. Both worlds. Though I guess the only way to avoid people complaining is to eliminate mute, since going through a 3rd party to initially communicate is rarely going to be the first thing that comes to a persons mind for resolving the issue.
I don't know how hard "shades of ignore/mute" would be to implement, but it might be something to play around with. Or what if we just had a #thunderdome where people could duke it out and not have their shit bleed all over the site?
wait I had an even better idea we just get rid of commenting altogether