Muted Terms

Twitter has a feature that's incredibly useful for a lot of different people - muted terms. This feature allows people to configure a list of terms that will be used to filter tweets out of their timelines - meaning they do not see tweets containing those terms.

In my work as a long-term community manager, I keep encountering problems that this feature would solve better than any community policy could. For example, a common problem is the stigmatization of food - while a small number of people have traumas related to food (all traumas are valid!) and would personally benefit from not being exposed to it, forcing all mentions of food into a specific channel or thread causes many, many problems for people attempting to recover from eating disorders or other traumas, as well as people of colour (and certain religious people) that wish to talk about their cultures.

I believe that a similar "muted terms" feature would be quite useful for people that find themselves in situations like this. My suggestion is to allow a user to configure a list of muted terms which is synced between their clients, and to have the Discord clients hide messages containing those terms in a similar way to how blocked messages are currently hidden. This would allow for a user-driven solution to the problem, and it would not be dependent on communities enforcing policies like this that may not have the intended effect in the end.