Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Private notes on LW?, published by Raemon on August 4, 2023 on LessWrong.

Lately I've been noticing what a powerup is to read things in google docs, where I can take whatever notes I want as in-line comments without worrying about looking dumb or confusing. In changes my relationship to confusing passages, where I feel much more affordance to think through what exactly is confusing about it.

As a general reading-habit, "copy it into google docs" is a pretty good habit. But I (and I think others on LW team although for slightly different reasons) have been thinking about building a feature directly into LW to facilitate it.

One version of it might explicitly be "private notes" that are optimized as such.

Another version of it might basically just take the side-comment button we already have and add a "private comments" option that lets you set the comment to "everyone", "only you", "you + author" (for giving the author feedback in a way that's more private than a comment but having more context included than a DM) [edit: also, sharing the comment with arbitrary people is a fairly obvious feature here]

Curious what people think about this and what options they'd expect themselves to use.

I'm maybe specifically wondering whether people expect a UI that's oriented around "arbitrary sharing" would feel good enough as a personal note-taking thing.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org