How it could work

Imagine Alice is being harassed by a troll or group of trolls we will call Malcolm. Currently she has the ability to mute them, but they can still see her, still see how much money she is making, still plot against her and negatively effect her user experience.

What if she could remove herself from their attention specifically without effecting anyone else?

Selective Channels

Selective channels would allow Alice to create a list of users who can no longer see her posts on the Steemit site. Instead of protecting herself from their hostile posts, she protects them from being triggered by her posts. Alice would simply select to remove Malcolm from having the privilege of experiencing and interacting with her. The idea is if they want to see her posts in order to stalk and harass her, they now have to go the extra mile and put forth greater effort by going off site to analyze the blockchain. This would move the problem off the Steemit site entirely.

This is a user interface and user experience issue

It does not require sophisticated cryptography. Alice would simply make a blacklist based upon whatever criteria and all accounts in this list will simply not see any of her posts. Her posts will be censored only to the people she doesn't want to see her. This gives her the power to reduce the amount of negative attention she receives through this website.

Each account would require a personalized user interface. Personalized to the point where the people who disconnect from them cannot be seen by them, so they wont be able to follow their posts anymore, find their feeds, or see their posts anywhere. Even if its the top trending post, they shouldn't be able to see it without going to another site.

And this would help solve the problem of harassment in a low privacy environment. Accounts would have to download data which gives them a more personalized user experience. It also has to be recognized that the originator of content does have the ability to control who accesses their content and them at least while on Steemit. On the blockchain everything is open.

The essence of this is the blogger gets to select their audience or select their followers or *exclude certain people from being able to follow them, reply to their posts, or even see their posts.

Mute must become Disconnect

And to disconnect must mean to remove all communication channels between the two people. Either side should be able to initiate this. Anyone should be able to determine the attention flow through the user interface, where if Alice disconnects from Malcolm, then Malcolm can't find anything from Alice on Steemit anymore, but the reverse, Alice also can't find anything from Malcolm, so that the mute is multiplex.