Matching for anonymous private messages now works

We've been talking about this one for far too long, but now finally it's here: you can dm with other anons. Right now the only way to dm is to get matched by liking/following each other's nyms. This is neat but not as useful as it could be. We're also going to add manual DM requests that build on the same mechanism so you can more directly contact someone whose posts you like, and have settings to be open to such requests by default.

We may also at some point make the process for vouching smoother and more inline without having to go to their page, suggest or auto-vouch connections based on your likes (option for two or more on same nym makes a vouch?). We will probably also add other consequences of vouching/liking/following and change the concept around. But this whole set of features is low priority and highly experimental. The ability to contact people is important, but all the subtleties aren't necessarily unless usage shows something unexpected. My hunch is this stuff may become important if we build a bunch more non-imageboard features, which is why I did it this way instead of absolute minimum viable dm system, but not until then. It's also possible that we will pare this all back down to absolute minimum viable nym-to-nym DM system without any matching concept.

Anyways, try it out and have fun. Let me know if anything breaks or could work better.

Nice, I’m excited to try it out.

>>2915
Fyi theres no notifications yet so you might miss that you matched or got a dm. Check the “you” page to see dms.

I've already matched with a few people (under multiple names even). Or at least I think it's a few people. Maybe it's just one of you. No way to know. This is fun! I find myself expecting a lot of great content to be posted to the private channels, and optimistic for the feature. Don't forget to post publicly too! Maybe the novelty will wear off soon.

>>2917
I guess one has to actively follow nyms for this work. Perhaps obvious from the description of the algorithm, but I'm not used to following on an anonymous board. Feels a bit counterintuitive.

>>2917
Surely a lot of great content will be sent via DM. A lot of the funniest and most interesting stuff from my time on Twitter has been in DMs and group chats. There could be a way to basically make group chats by limiting threads to only be seem by nyms you want to.

>>2920
It will become more smooth to follow and message people once more posts are created with persistent nyms and people attach old posts to a singly nym.

I think the novelty won’t wear off and the feature will be used more often once people become more comfortable posting under a name.

>>2920
Yeah its a bit awkward still. “Follow” is probably the wrong concept, the UI needs an overhaul, and i’m going to add other features that clarify things and reduce need to run around “following” people (eg manual dm requests). Anonymous social networking is not something that has been done much before so we’re fumbling in the dark a bit. But here’s another way to think about it:

Every type of public entity on the site has ways you can interact with it that embed deliberate value judgements and open up further spaces of action. For posts, reply and upvote vs hide, which control visibility. For poster nyms, follow/mute or like/ban or something where a positive judgement creates the possibility of private messaging them (besides increasing their reputation). For tags, “follow” or “join” (vs “mute”) might be a better concept, and may open up certain kinds of “membership” in the tag where you see more or are trusted more. And then in all cases these value judgements are also used to compute moderation actions (curating good posts, hiding bad posts, banning hostiles, curating tags, etc). All of this subject to revision as we figure it out, but thats the idea: value judgements over public entities, embedded in possibilities of interaction, contributing to public consensus formation.

Nym judgements will also start to make more sense for named posters, if people start doing that more.