The public notice is an innovation over facebook, but you’d still see a bunch of people referring to one conversation thread that you can’t see. The problem is the lack of common knowledge of what’s actually going on.
Fair enough, but it still seems like an okay situation to me, with something pretty close to common knowledge of what’s going on: everyone but X knows exactly what is visible to whom, and X knows everything except the content (edit: and actual existence, but not potential existence) of a well-defined set of comments that they have chosen to opt out of.
So nobody but Y will have any trouble communicating with X; I guess occasionally someone will unthinkingly refer to something from a Y subthread, but any resulting confusion will be easy to resolve. (And there could be a norm/rule against anything akin to bypassing X’s ignore list by reposting Y’s comments.)
Not absolutely perfect, sure—but the existing system certainly isn’t either.
This mostly just doesn’t actually solve the sort of problem that I think most authors have with hosting discussions they don’t want on their post. (But, it’s cruxy for me that I don’t expect people to want it. If some authors I respected did want it I’d be open to it)
I guess an unstated part of my position is that there’s a limit to how much control a LW user can reasonably expect to have over other users’ commenting, and that if they want more control than my suggested system allows them then they should probably post to their own blog rather than LW. But I get that you (and at least some others) disagree with me, and/or are aware of users who do want more control and are sufficiently valuable to LW to justify catering to their needs in this way. I won’t push the point; thanks for engaging.
(FWIW, my biggest issue with the current system is that it’s not obvious to most readers when people are banned from commenting on a post, and thus some posts could appear to have an exaggerated level of support/absence of good counterarguments from the LW community.)
Wouldn’t the ‘public notice’ in my second point remove that ambiguity?
And I’m not playing dumb here, I just don’t use Facebook: does it have something like that public notice?
The public notice is an innovation over facebook, but you’d still see a bunch of people referring to one conversation thread that you can’t see. The problem is the lack of common knowledge of what’s actually going on.
Fair enough, but it still seems like an okay situation to me, with something pretty close to common knowledge of what’s going on: everyone but X knows exactly what is visible to whom, and X knows everything except the content (edit: and actual existence, but not potential existence) of a well-defined set of comments that they have chosen to opt out of.
So nobody but Y will have any trouble communicating with X; I guess occasionally someone will unthinkingly refer to something from a Y subthread, but any resulting confusion will be easy to resolve. (And there could be a norm/rule against anything akin to bypassing X’s ignore list by reposting Y’s comments.)
Not absolutely perfect, sure—but the existing system certainly isn’t either.
This mostly just doesn’t actually solve the sort of problem that I think most authors have with hosting discussions they don’t want on their post. (But, it’s cruxy for me that I don’t expect people to want it. If some authors I respected did want it I’d be open to it)
I guess an unstated part of my position is that there’s a limit to how much control a LW user can reasonably expect to have over other users’ commenting, and that if they want more control than my suggested system allows them then they should probably post to their own blog rather than LW. But I get that you (and at least some others) disagree with me, and/or are aware of users who do want more control and are sufficiently valuable to LW to justify catering to their needs in this way. I won’t push the point; thanks for engaging.
(FWIW, my biggest issue with the current system is that it’s not obvious to most readers when people are banned from commenting on a post, and thus some posts could appear to have an exaggerated level of support/absence of good counterarguments from the LW community.)