I'm not muddling anything, there has been a lot of talk about how the mute functonality isn't actually being abused, and I've given several concrete examples of it. If the admins don't consider that abuse, then the site as a whole will never be above being a good old boys club, the mute feature just is not acceptable unless you're an old hand who has more to gain than to lose with it.

Most of your reaction reads pretty closely to mine honestly. This could be a site for a good community, but it was designed from the get-go to protect the old hands in a way that reddit didn't do, and I do react fairly negatively to that. I have a very strong sense of fairness, and quite frankly it offends me to see that fairness so blatantly disregarded.

I'm not really a part of this site, and haven't been since first couple of days. I come back every few days to a week to see if anything crops up that I may be interested in, but this is not a site for me. I'm not appreciated here, nor is my personality one that will ever fit in with the culture here. I'm just too outspoken and blunt for that to ever be the case. It happens, it isn't good, it isn't bad, it just is. Sometimes there are places you just should not be.

That strong sense of fairness means no one who ever attacks me will never have to worry that I'll remove their ability to involve themselves in the discussion because I find that to be far more egregious than the attacks themselves. Just because someone thinks I'm an asshole doesn't give me the right to prevent them from speaking their minds, yes, even when they gloat about dropping the 'banhammer' on me (8bit) or talk about how they're wielding the mute feature specifically to get rid of me because they have a black belt in internet badassery or some such (klein). I believe both of these posters are college age kids, so I can forgive them the foolishness.

But not the muting itself, that needs to go.

Because you're right, it does make a lot of new users feel unwelcome (I became an outspoken critic because of this issue). It was specifically designed to. As I said in my other post, hubski was borne out of the frustration the 'old timers' had on reddit when they started fighting the new users and lost because the new users out numbered them (and reddit is a level playing field). What we got was hubski, where the old users wield more power than the new users, meaning they have a better chance of winning that fight.

Most of the content on this site is on reddit and/or HN already anyway. There's a lot of talk about Hubski not being reddit, but it doesn't seem to want to differentiate too heavily from the content being shown on reddit.

The good thing that has come out of my experience with Hubski is that it's solidified what I like about Reddit and what I want out of a social aggregation site in general. It's caused me to really consider implementing my own because there are things that Reddit needs to fix as well (the power wielded by subreddit mods in particular), but a site for actual discourse Hubski is not, nor will it ever be while that Mute feature exists.