Microcosm Feature Suggestions

Logically that makes perfect sense. In practice I think people are too accustomed to the idea of 1-to-1 conversations, even it's an illusion. Are you confident you can persuade all users to understand this?

That's really the best question.

Which is why I'm not going to call them Private Messages.

It would take re-naming them, introducing them in a way that people are comfortable with, and good UX.

I'll be testing this out in the next few weeks, and coming up with designs... so we'll see then.

If I'm wrong, we can implement what we have today. But it is a shitty second-rate solution. Things like threading messages into a conversation won't work and will be complex and hard-to-understand because I can't create a single conversation out of messages that all have different permissions and visibility.

I do think this proposal is a much simpler one, easier to understand, and with more benefits to privacy than not. It's totally counter-intuitive to suggest that more visibility = more privacy, but in this case I think that's what it does.

Oh, and in about a month's time I'll be wanting a whole load of people to come in and try out the new interfaces. It'll be just in the design phase, so we'll be looking for feedback on all of the proposals on the new design.