Yes, I can mute the conversations, and more frequently that's what I'm doing.
But the problem here is that I can't moderate what I don't read. So we can either have:
1. Unmoderated slime, or
B. Burned out users moderating their comment sections.
All because Mastodon doesn't give us a third option to block replies. I should be able to close a thread when things go zany.
(This is not an invitation to tell me about other software that does this, I'm intentionally singling out Mastodon.)