There are different levels of abusive chat, but they're all treated the same

I've been silenced four times. Yes, four times. I deserved them all. I was definitely toxic in my criticism of other players' playing abilities. Every time the duration is increased by a day. Every time I've been silenced, it's been because people report me for my inability to keep my criticism of their bad plays to myself. Did you see the post the other day about Krohn's "toxic" (not-toxic) comment, where he was about to type to auriel telling them to heal him, but instead he just sent "my bad?" I'm the type of player who doesn't get that far in thinking and says exactly what he was going to if he hadn't stopped himself.

It's probably irritating for some people, but then again, I take the same criticism that I deal out, like when people laugh at me for taking lava wave and I have to explain to them that I know exactly what I'm doing (I'm level 90, I have 500+ QM+HL games with Rag and a >60% win rate in HL with him this season).

Some things of course just get the better of me. I had a guy BAN my ragnaros pick because he said I missed too many sulfuras smashes the game before (which is weird, because I killed the same target twice that game with a smash, but he said that wasn't good enough, because there were others I missed). I really let that guy have it in chat, but he was an asshole and he threw the game for us, ignoring objectives and soloing. And yet he can report me for abusive chat, but my reports on his non-participation really mean nothing.

Those kinds of players just get under my skin. It'd probably be easier if I just turned off allied chat, but I like to be able to communicate. I'm really trying to get better, but I feel like constructive criticism needs to be in the game, I really do, but I guess I'm really bad at it.

But then there's just straight up abusive chat... you know the kind that veers completely away from the game and gets personal. That I've never understood. I've never insulted anyone themselves. I don't know these players, I don't know anything about them. The only thing I can possibly talk about is their ability to play (something that, by the way, streamers can get away with because streamers just get to vent to their viewers instead of venting to their team mates).

Had a game last night where I was playing in a group against AI. A player looks at my party member's name not 10 seconds into the game, before the gates had even opened, and says "Wow, that sounds like the kind of name someone who plays Dragonball would pick." Okay then. He keeps going. "I bet you have lots of acne and a huge neckbeard." I responded, "Well, first of all, that player is a girl." He says, "That's even worse." I reported them for abusive chat to mute them at that point. I know that other party member is a girl cuz they were sitting right next to me, my wife. She plays vs AI so I play with her there. I had her report that player too.

The game hadn't even started. It's not like they were trying to make her feel bad because of her playing. They were just a straight up asshole. That really baffles me. I can get reported for saying to someone "We could have used you in that fight" or "Next time focus on objective" and the system treats it exactly the same as someone who is commenting on someone's appearance and hygiene, because abusive chat report is just automatic. It doesn't care what was actually said.

There's no good solution to this. It would be absolutely daunting for Blizzard to sift through millions of lines of chat to manually report people. However, I have to imagine that people aren't marked silent THAT often, and blizzard should have a way to match the time stamps of chat logs to the time stamp of reports.

It makes me wonder if typing in anything under that comment field makes any difference at all. Is some toxicity in the game worse than other types? And if so, is that something Blizzard can actually do anything about? I'm not sure ;-/