I think incompatibilities often drive people away (e.g. at LessOnline I have let ppl know they can ask certain ppl not to come to their sessions, as it would make them not want to run the sessions, and this is definitely not due to criticism but to conflict between the two people). That’s one reason why I think this should be available.

This is something I currently want to accommodate but not encourage people to use moderation tools for, but maybe I'm wrong. How can I get a better sense of what's going on with this kind of incompatibility? Why do you think "definitely not due to criticism but to conflict"?

I think bad commenters also drive people away. There are bad commenters who seem fine when inspecting any single comment but when inspecting longer threads and longer patterns they’re draining energy and provide no good ideas or arguments. Always low quality criticisms, stated maximally aggressively, not actually good at communication/learning. I can think of many examples.

It seems like this requires a very different kind of solution than either local bans or mutes, which most people don't or probably won't use, so can't help in most places. Like maybe allow people to vote on commenters instead of just comments, and then their comments get a default karma based on their commenter karma (or rather the direct commenter-level karma would contribute to the default karma, in addition to their total karma which currently determines the default karma).

Most substantial criticisms on this site have come in post and quick takes form, such as Wentworth’s critiques of other alignment strategies, or the sharp left turn discourse, or Natalia’s critiques of Guzey’s sleep hypotheses / SMTM’s lithium hypothesis, or Eliezer’s critique of the bioanchors report.

I'm worried about less "substantial" criticisms that are unlikely to get their own posts, like just pointing out a relatively obvious mistake in the OP, or lack of clarity, or failure to address some important counterargument.

It would be easy to give authors a button to let them look at comments that they've muted. (This seems so obvious that I didn't think to mention it, and I'm confused by your inference that authors would have no ability to look at the muted comments at all. At the very least they can simply log out.)

In the discussion under the original post, some people will have read the reply post, and some won't (perhaps including the original post's author, if they banned the commenter in part to avoid having to look at their content), so I have to model this.

Sure, let's give people moderation tools, but why trust authors with unilateral powers that can't be overriden by the community, such as banning and moving comments/commenters to a much less visible section?

My proposal was meant to address the requirement that some authors apparently have to avoid interacting with certain commenters. All proposals dealing with this imply multiple conversations and people having to model different states of knowledge in others, unless those commenters are just silenced altogether, so I'm confused why it's more confusing to have multiple conversations happening in the same place when those conversations are marked clearly.

It seems to me like the main difference is that Habryka just trusts authors to "garden their spaces" more than I do, and wants to actively encourage this, whereas I'm reluctantly trying to accommodate such authors. I'm not sure what's driving this difference though. People on Habryka's side (so far only he has spoken up, but there's clearly more given voting patterns) seem very reluctant to directly address the concern that people like me have that even great authors are human and likely biased quite strongly when it comes to evaluating strong criticism, unless they've done so somewhere I haven't seen.

Maybe it just comes down to differing intuitions and there's not much to say? There's some evidence available though, like Said's highly upvoted comment nevertheless triggering a desire to ban Said. Has Habryka seen more positive evidence that I haven't?

To reduce clutter you can reuse the green color bars that currently indicate new comments, and make it red for muted comments.

Authors might rarely ban commenters because the threat of banning drives them away already. And if the bans are rare then what's the big deal with requiring moderator approval first?

giving the author social legitimacy to control their own space, combined with checks and balance

I would support letting authors control their space via the mute and flag proposal, adding my weight to its social legitimacy, and I'm guessing others who currently are very much against the ban system (thus helping to deprive it of social legitimacy) would also support or at least not attack it much in the future. I and I think others would be against any system that lets authors unilaterally exert very strong control of visibility of comments such as by moving them to a bottom section.

But I guess you're actually talking about something else, like how comfortable does the UX make the author, thus encouraging them to use it more. It seems like you're saying you don't want to make the muting to be too in your face, because that makes authors uncomfortable and reluctant to use it? Or you simultaneously want authors to have a lot of control over comment visibility, but don't want that fact to be easily visible (and the current ban system accomplishes this)? I don't know, this just seems very wrong to me, like you want authors to feel social legitimacy that doesn't actually exist, ie if most people support giving authors more control then why would it be necessary to hide it.

Yeah I think it would help me understand your general perspective better if you were to explain more why you don't like my proposal. What about just writing out the top 3 reasons for now, if you don't want to risk investing a lot of time on something that might not turn out to be productive?

Comments almost never get downvoted.

Assuming your comment was serious (which on reflection I think it probably was), what about a modification to my proposed scheme, that any muted commenter gets an automatic downvote from the author when they comment? Then it would stay at the bottom unless enough people actively upvoted it? (I personally don't think this is necessary because low quality comments would stay near the bottom even without downvotes just from lack of upvotes, but I want to address this if it's a real blocker for moving away from the ban system.)

BTW my old, now defunct user script LW Power Reader had a feature to adjust the font size of comments based on their karma, so that karma could literally affect visibility despite "the thread structure making strict karma sorting impossible". So you could implement that if you want, but it's not really relevant to the current debate since karma obviously affects visibility virtually even without sorting, in the sense that people can read the number and decide to skip the comment or not.

Said's comment that triggered this debate is 39/34, at the top of the comments section of the post and #6 in Popular Comments for the whole site, but you want to allow the author to ban Said from future commenting, with the rationale "you should model karma as currently approximately irrelevant for managing visibility of comments". I think this is also wrong generally as I've often found karma to be very helpful in exposing high quality comments to me, and keeping lower quality comments less visible toward the bottom, or allowing me to skip them if they occur in the middle of threads.

I almost think the nonsensical nature of this justification is deliberate, but I'm not quite sure. In any case, sigh...