Well, it's an opt-out system, so if people use it they know they're cutting out certain things from their feed. And if people don't use it then they're limited to seeing everything that shows up on the site. What if I don't care about football and there's an influx of football discussion popping up all over? I can either like Hubski less or just cut out the tags and/or people that annoy me. I can save myself from the changing character of the Hubski user-base. Every large site needs some kind of segmentation. It's inevitable that this kind of thing will happen.
But what if something truly amazing happens and you miss it? Ok, i can certainly understand niche things like football, even art and music arguably. But isn't unfollowing #hubski or #askhubski, because something pissed you off, like turning your back on the whole community?
I unfollowed #askhubski, but I still check it out. Since unfollowing I've checked it out at least once a day. And, on top of that, just because I've unfollowed doesn't mean it shows up in my feed: now it only shows up in my feed if posted or shared by someone who I follow (which, admittedly, limits it pretty severely). I guess muting/ignoring would be a different step. Clearly I haven't explored these options enough to even know the difference between the two though. I am loath to use both.
If someone pisses you off, you just ignore them specifically. You're not going to be able to avoid missing things that happen outside your selection of followed items. Some people really really don't want to miss out on stuff that happens in sites like this. I'm not one of them--it's madness to me. No one expects you to see every little thing on here. Who has time for that? And there's a variety of ways to catch things you might miss now: the Hubski newsletter, the bestof thing that is starting to take off, the fact that you can browse by number of spokes on the wheel, etc. So if someone wants to catch it all, then they simply don't use the blocking features. If people don't then it's not hurting anyone.