Include a "specific people (specify)" read permission too. Then it can be used to write private replies to comments.

Often, private replies are the entire solution to discussions becoming personal, it's a lot easier to take a hit to the ego, or acknowledge personal failings, when there isn't an audience. These side conversations are a major part of the solution to performative narcissism and atomization, even though, of course, you don't see them taking place, in public.

Relatedly, I'd really like to be able to attach private notes to author's names. There are pairs of people on LW with names I find it easy to mistake, and being able to look at the author of a post or comment and see a self-note "This is the user who is really insightful about X" or "Don't start arguing with this person, it takes forever and goes nowhere" etc would be very helpful.

I've used https://hypothes.is for taking notes on sites that don't necessarily support that, mostly to share with others. It might be easier than the Google Docs approach.

I'm reluctant to trust personal notes with third parties. They might get leaked or lost or paywalled. I'd be more willing to copy articles into something like Joplin than Google Docs. Public comments at least get archived by archive.org, and weren't supposed to be private to begin with.

I do like the idea of being able to DM an author with context. I'd probably use it for things like pointing out spelling or grammar mistakes. I'm reluctant to make public comments about those things, because I don't want to embarrass the author, or seem like I'm trying to steal status points, but as an author, I'd prefer to correct such things in my own posts, and would find them faster if they were pointed out. The potential for abuse seems not really worse than the existing DM system.

One thing that would be really cool is if you could share your notes on a particular document such that you could produce a sharable annotated version of a document.

For some posts, it may become standard to read Bob's annotations on Katie's document rather than to read the document raw.

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. 

Maybe consider making it super easy (one click easy) to export LW posts to google docs? 

I rarely take private notes, but I do a lot of highlighting. Currently via Readwise Reader, which requires a monthly subscription; before that by highlighting passages in Kindle ebooks etc. The way highlighting is implemented often allows you to attach a note to your highlight, which would correspond to your private notes.

One challenge with highlighting and digital note-taking is: what happens after you finish reading? Can you export your highlights? Do you have to do that manually, or does it happen automatically? Or, if you can't export your highlights, can you at least see them all in one place?

If you consistently take highlights on one site or device, you probably want to do the same in others. But do they even all support highlighting? And even if so, how do you collect all those highlights in one central spot? Etc.

By default, if those things aren't possible, then you might take lots of highlights or notes, and yet never look at them again after the fact. At least that's been my own experience.

Wait. When I comment on a Google Doc, that comment seems to be public (unless I make a private copy of the doc, which based on this, I will do more often - this seems like a very useful habit).

I wouldn’t push for significant work on LW to support private comments, notes, etc. to me, LW is primarily about public posts and comments, and that’s where I’d like it to focus.

There may be a middle-ground feature, like comment drafts or the like, which COULD remain private, but is intended and useful for improving the quality and intentionality of published content.

Another thing that would be multi-purpose handy would be “view markup” or “export in compatible format”, which both makes it easier to understand LW, and easier to copy into a private notes repo if that’s your thing, and easier to archive copies of posts you want to keep offline or independent of the site.

I would definitely routinely use a private side-comment feature, and also a you+author feature! I don't like offering corrections for typos in the general comments because it messes up the flow of reading them for content.

I could imagine a few use-cases of sharing with arbitrary people, but haven't had a time where I wished I had the feature yet.

also, sharing the comment with arbitrary people is a fairly obvious feature here

if one goes in this direction, then a natural next step might be the ability to organize private multi-party discussion...

the main use case would be as follows, in my opinion: there are plenty of sensitive technical topics in the field of AI existential safety; in particular, many important approaches and techniques are of dual use, they can be used to improve safety and they can be used to boost capabilities; "security via relative obscurity" is one possible approach here, but LessWrong does not currently have any mechanisms to support additional levels of "security via relative obscurity"...

the question is: what would be a downside of having something like that? let's ponder this...

hm maybe you have a private note version of a post, but each inline comment can optionally be sent to a kind of granular permissions version of shortform, to gradually open it up to your inner circle before putting it on regular shortform.