Muting blocks the member's ability to comment and chat entirely on their end, and it's obvious to them. I would love to mute a member, but I also don't like the idea of them knowing and potentially getting angry about it. My proposal is to implement a shadow mute option that would prevent a member's comments from being seen by the wider community but the member doesn't know about it. In other words, the member can still write their comments and it will visibly go through on their end, but other members won't be able to see it and the shadow muted member would think nothing of it.

I also think the creator should still be able to see the shadow muted comments and have the option to manually approve individual comments if they are fine.