Just to weigh in as I’ve thought about it since @pirxdanford asked:
Unlike traditional user forums where the corrective action is to ask an authority figure to step in and swat down a misbehaving user, our goal for Discourse is to allow (and encourage!) the user community to police itself while giving them the power to do so.
Hopefully this will be enough; I think giving participants the ability to easily ignore others avoids the process of giving the ‘troublemaker’ notice of what he’s doing wrong. Sometimes it’s not deliberate behaviour, yet sometimes it’s accidental.
Rather than having a bunch of users ignored (which can lead to fragmented conversations), I’m hoping that the feeling of a community, together, asking a problem user to change his behaviour can better lead to Civilized Discourse.
Now, there will be times that this doesn’t work or when the community doesn’t agree. So ultimately I think we’ll eventually need to have have the ability to ignore, but I would hope that it’s used more as a last resort.