How many subjects experiencing something as an insult are required to consider the insult objective?

This is a nice one, but I think we cannot make a subjective thing objective by democracy, that is exactly what makes me shudder in life for a long time now - we're still a pre-truth civilization as we have not been able to consistently separate fact from fiction in day-to-day life. This is why we haven't reached the information age; we're still tribal, territorial primates with a long evolution ahead of us.

What you can do is measure consensus. But that is also not what is happening on SN now, as "money is the moderator", not "stackers' collective opinion is the moderator". The distinction being that SN is open loop, so there is no limit to moderation power other than Bitcoin's built-in limits (assuming that there is no paper bitcoin, and that assumption is likely faulty.)

How much of a place should it have if it's one person interested in a topic particular piece of content?

In my personal utopian scenario: in a decaying position in global new, a slower decaying position in territory new, and since no one is interested in it, the bottom of all ranked views. If everyone muted the author, then it will never rise to prominence because it won't get zaps.

But if you were asking: how much of a place does it have right now? Then the answer is: the place the author is willing to buy. And this is the issue here. We don't want people manipulating their own ranks with sockpuppets, so instead we gave everyone a button to manipulate their rank. Let me apply that to your metaphor:

As you'd expect, people at k00b's party complain that someone(s) self-proclaimed millionaire(s) are aggressively changing the channel by outbidding to manipulate the ranking system to rage bait war slop and they'd like to mute that channel. k00b obliges and, now, depending on the remote control in your hand, you see something other than the shared, default channel.

The root cause of this problem isn't the mute. The root cause is the boost (or sockpuppet upzapping in lieu of boost - same outcome) and the root enabler of that is open loop money being the unbounded moderator. The muting is just a personal defense mechanism, and I think that undue weight is given to the usage of it. I counted less than 10 stackers (maybe even less than 5) that were actively trying to selflessly counter the big downzap war earlier this year. If it doesn't happen organically, it won't happen as a forced mechanism. If forced, the established base may leave, which is even worse than the new stacker leaving, as the established base provides the content. This will only make it harder to fight "rage bait war slop".

I wish I were better at math, so that I could define a formula that shows the impact of unbounded open-loop. The soothing effect of sum(log10()) ranking we had before no-trust is truly missed, but I suspect that it simply masked the problem by flattening the curve, instead of solving the underlying problem.