I do have to mute posts in my community sometimes. It is not meant to be a bad thing but more me just controlling what content people see. If the muting has a negative effect and there is a pragmatic solution I am all for it!
IMO, the mute function is needed because community mods need to filter content so they can protect the feed from spammers and abusers. The negative effect can be if someone mutes just because they can, as I said, it can be subjective.
Before, it was common to have very strict rules, like for example a no more than one post every 24 hours, but there were cases when the post had 23 hours, and the mod muted the post. So that post was "lost". With this option, the author would not lose that post.
And when a post is muted in a community, it is also muted in the feed of the tags. SO if I used #sports, for example, and the sports community mutes my post for whatever reason, no one will see my post when checking the #sports tag.
One thing I did to help stop spam is just setup my community so only members can post
Not sure if you seen this but it is under settings. I think there is a max of 100 members but if you have 100 members actively posting you prob need some insane amount of HP to curate all of that 😅
That's a great strategy, but how does someone request to be a member?
I actually have a community where only I can post.
I made a blog post for my community and just asked people to request membership in the comments.