“Not being able to get the knowledge if you are curious” and “some people have of course read different things” are quite different states of affairs!
I am objecting to the former. I agree that of course any conversation with more than 10 participants will have some variance in who knows what, but that’s not what I am talking about.
It would be easy to give authors a button to let them look at comments that they’ve muted. (This seems so obvious that I didn’t think to mention it, and I’m confused by your inference that authors would have no ability to look at the muted comments at all. At the very least they can simply log out.)
I mean, kind of. The default UI experience of everyone will still differ by a lot (and importantly between people who will meaningfully be “in the same room”) and the framing of the feature as “muted comments” does indeed not communicate that.
The exact degree of how much it would make the dynamics more confusing would end up depending on the saliency of the author UI, but of course commenters will have no idea what the author UI looks like, and so can’t form accurate expectations about how likely the author is to end up making the muted comments visible to them.
Contrast to a situation with two comment sections. The default assumption is that the author and the users just see the exact same thing. There is no uncertainty about whether maybe the author has things by default collapsed whereas the commenters do not. People know what everyone else is seeing, and it’s communicated in the most straightforward way. I don’t even really know what I would do to communicate to commenters what the author sees (it’s not an impossible UI challenge, you can imagine a small screenshot on the tooltip of the “muted icon” that shows what the author UI looks like, but that doesn’t feel to me like a particularly elegant solution).
One of the key things I mean by “the UI looking the same for all users” is maintaining common knowledge about who is likely to read what, or at least the rough process that determines what people read and what context they have. If I give the author some special UI where some things are hidden, then in order to maintain common knowledge I now need to show the users what the author’s UI looks like (and show the author what the users are being shown about the author UI, but this mostly would take care of itself since all authors will be commenters in other contexts).
“Not being able to get the knowledge if you are curious” and “some people have of course read different things” are quite different states of affairs!
I am objecting to the former. I agree that of course any conversation with more than 10 participants will have some variance in who knows what, but that’s not what I am talking about.
It would be easy to give authors a button to let them look at comments that they’ve muted. (This seems so obvious that I didn’t think to mention it, and I’m confused by your inference that authors would have no ability to look at the muted comments at all. At the very least they can simply log out.)
I mean, kind of. The default UI experience of everyone will still differ by a lot (and importantly between people who will meaningfully be “in the same room”) and the framing of the feature as “muted comments” does indeed not communicate that.
The exact degree of how much it would make the dynamics more confusing would end up depending on the saliency of the author UI, but of course commenters will have no idea what the author UI looks like, and so can’t form accurate expectations about how likely the author is to end up making the muted comments visible to them.
Contrast to a situation with two comment sections. The default assumption is that the author and the users just see the exact same thing. There is no uncertainty about whether maybe the author has things by default collapsed whereas the commenters do not. People know what everyone else is seeing, and it’s communicated in the most straightforward way. I don’t even really know what I would do to communicate to commenters what the author sees (it’s not an impossible UI challenge, you can imagine a small screenshot on the tooltip of the “muted icon” that shows what the author UI looks like, but that doesn’t feel to me like a particularly elegant solution).
One of the key things I mean by “the UI looking the same for all users” is maintaining common knowledge about who is likely to read what, or at least the rough process that determines what people read and what context they have. If I give the author some special UI where some things are hidden, then in order to maintain common knowledge I now need to show the users what the author’s UI looks like (and show the author what the users are being shown about the author UI, but this mostly would take care of itself since all authors will be commenters in other contexts).