Interesting way of doings things.
I do agree that having a mute button is helpful, especially when you go to the trending page and you want to see only a certain type of articles. However, I believe that it would be even better if we would have a better way of sorting articles that will help us see only the type of articles we want.
Muting other people it's a nice feature, but who knows, maybe they will publish something interesting at some point in the future, something we would like, and we can't see it because we muted them.
I still didn't mute anyone yet, and I'm not sure if I will do it soon, but I hope they add a better way to sort things and see only the things you're interested in.
Great post and best of luck!
Its just one of the limited tools we have available to us, so I like to make use of them.