(Obviously, such “shadow threads” would have to be clearly visually distinguished. But that is easy enough.)
Edit: Some additional thoughts:
If this feature is implemented, then, I think, it may also be useful to have a “Make this private comment public” button. Such a button would be attached to any comment of yours which was (a) private, and (b) the response to an already-public comment (i.e., you could not “publicize” a private comment which was itself a response to your interlocutor’s private comment—though of course they could make their comment public, and then yours, which would now be a response to a public comment, would become “publicizable”). (In this way, a fruitful private discussion could be “taken public” with minimal overhead, and without violating anyone’s total over the privacy status of their own utterances.)
Naturally, such an action would have to be irreversible (or, to be more specific, “un-publicizing” a publicized “shadow comment” would have to leave exactly the same evidence as deleting an ordinary comment: an empty comment, marked as a formerly-publicized and now-un-publicized “shadow comment”).
I’m mostly joking now, but a principle of all possible things being intended would dictate that Alice can click an option on Bob’s shadow reply to replace it with a public “Alice claims that Bob shadow-replied thus:”. Alice can fake this, and Bob can confirm iff it’s true.
It’s the sort of feature you might want in a cyberpunk role-playing game taking the shape of a forum.
People could edit their posts to claim that someone else private-messaged or shadow-replied to them, which disrespects the rule that the author can make it public but can’t exactly be stopped without people just evading to the nearest unblocked strategy. By acknowledging this in the UI, we preempt attempts to use censorship or dark arts to curb the practice, and people building alternate clients that add the feature, see reddit’s deleted post mirrors.
There’s also the thing where people grew up on 4chan embracing the anarchy, and not used to that you can enhance the wild west web’s user experience without destroying it.
I rather like this idea, actually!
(Obviously, such “shadow threads” would have to be clearly visually distinguished. But that is easy enough.)
Edit: Some additional thoughts:
If this feature is implemented, then, I think, it may also be useful to have a “Make this private comment public” button. Such a button would be attached to any comment of yours which was (a) private, and (b) the response to an already-public comment (i.e., you could not “publicize” a private comment which was itself a response to your interlocutor’s private comment—though of course they could make their comment public, and then yours, which would now be a response to a public comment, would become “publicizable”). (In this way, a fruitful private discussion could be “taken public” with minimal overhead, and without violating anyone’s total over the privacy status of their own utterances.)
Naturally, such an action would have to be irreversible (or, to be more specific, “un-publicizing” a publicized “shadow comment” would have to leave exactly the same evidence as deleting an ordinary comment: an empty comment, marked as a formerly-publicized and now-un-publicized “shadow comment”).
I’m mostly joking now, but a principle of all possible things being intended would dictate that Alice can click an option on Bob’s shadow reply to replace it with a public “Alice claims that Bob shadow-replied thus:”. Alice can fake this, and Bob can confirm iff it’s true.
It’s the sort of feature you might want in a cyberpunk role-playing game taking the shape of a forum.
Uh, can you expand on this part?
That… does sound pretty cool, yeah.
People could edit their posts to claim that someone else private-messaged or shadow-replied to them, which disrespects the rule that the author can make it public but can’t exactly be stopped without people just evading to the nearest unblocked strategy. By acknowledging this in the UI, we preempt attempts to use censorship or dark arts to curb the practice, and people building alternate clients that add the feature, see reddit’s deleted post mirrors.
There’s also the thing where people grew up on 4chan embracing the anarchy, and not used to that you can enhance the wild west web’s user experience without destroying it.