
There was a lot I never got to explore here. It was cool watching everyone else though. Maybe someday I'll open up like that too.
I think the other thing besides dev workload is that once you have private communication fully you take on an entirely new level of moderation workload that "take care of it yourself, block the sender" can only patch over so far.
For a site that still only has one moderator and won't take on volunteer moderators because they're understandably staunch about paying people for their work.
It's not that it enables a type of abuse that doesn't already exist with ask, but it adds a lot more capacity/volume for it
see, i would argue any liability that would open up -already exists- due to asks
like, that's kinda my point, if you are gonna be shit to someone privately you can already do that in asks, and people have done this before. So if that's your perogative and someone has their asks enabled, you can just go do that until you get moderated/blocked
(ok i just properly read the last line about volume - I think that makes sense and i don't totally disagree but i'm not sure it's a solid argument to just not have the feature, personally)
the argument is to hire more staff (which they can't afford) or at least accept the need for volunteer moderation even if it compromises on your vision for "everyone who works for us gets paid"
and i understand, as someone who has done (and burned out hard on) volunteer community management and moderation why they don't want to make that decision but while they're bottlenecked on how much one moderator can do, it's going to affect what they can release as features.
and you mighht be right! but at this point it would be more "the quantity of communication on the site is going up" from having all these avenues, having one person have to direct three roads' worth of traffic vs one road's
so you have them already burdened with base posting, then asks, and now you're adding DMs, that's going to increase the volume of content they have to moderate.
It's not that there's gonna be different abuse it's that there's going to be more channels for it that allow for more of it
I suppose providing this feature would -encourage- more private communication (leading to some of what you're talking about), but there's a part of me that thinks that that could actually have a positive moderation effect by reducing the amount of passive aggressive public posting that ends up starting conflicts, too, lol.
but yeah, taking all these thoughts into advisement, I can see where you're coming from for sure.
I think Lori said it at one point, we're in that catch 22 where cohost really needs more staff to facilitate any amount of growth and feature development that drives growth, but it can't afford to hire those staff because it hasn't grown enough to justify it, and they're understandably commited to refusing unpaid work.
Can't grow without more staff, can't hire more staff untill it grows, or something such.
There is an entire category of risk-reward based abuse that this kind of communication would open up for creepy solicitous people who are genuinely hoping for a private response to their wildly inappropriate messages. It does enable a type of abuse that doesn't already exist with ask. It isn't worth it for this site to implement it any time soon.
Also spam.
I don’t understand the spam case. If it’s not a problem with asks, why would adding a private reply button incentivize it in some new way?
Like, it’s extremely easy to just make it in such a way where only mutuals can DM you or whatever and that pretty much nukes the vast majority of spam and abuse issues right there. It’s not hard to make design decisions that dramatically reduce the likelihood of the kinds of problems you can have in more generalized private communication systems. People here already block the people they don’t like and don’t want to talk to.
I don’t understand the spam case. If it’s not a problem with asks,
This isn't to dispute your overall point, just a sidenote, but unfortunately it is a problem with asks.
I am not convinced from this though that it’s actually a problem that has actually affected anyone for real though?
I just see it as it'd probably bloat up some storage or other.
I find that extremely doubtful given the fact that this site hosts images, which are far bigger than any text DM you could send
I won't say whether or not it's a good business decision because frankly that sort of thing doesn't really interest me. What I will say is I'm happy to not have one more app to check for messages. Linking my discord in my bio for mutuals is plenty for the purpose of DMs. If I wanted everyone to have the ability to message I'd just make it public. ez pz
Cohost itself is a website that actively dissuades you from spending too much time on it. Be it through pagination, selective notifications, the lack of visible likes, or whatever else. Maybe DMs don't really fit that ethos. Either way, again, I'm happy to not have one more set of messaging threads to manage.
when you say they should use the ask system, do you mean like, the underlying code could be reused? because it would feel real annoying imo to not having some manner of conversation history per profile youre DMing.