First point is very good and I hadn’t thought of it. I guess hiding something lessens the chance you get discovered, but always makes you appear more guilty if/when you are. I guess that that is more relevant the more people you think you have digging around for dirt.
Second point: Karma? But that does require you to be logged in of course.
Third: This could be addressed by not making it the choice of the poster, but by requiring a certain number of readers to click a “make this non-public” button. Then it’s more of a community decides kind of thing. Of course if you want to make a non-public post about a controversial topic, you have to rely on others make it so.
Another approach would be to make posts less findable (I’ll add these ideas to the original post too)
There could be a check box for users that added a noindex tag
If someone doesn’t want to draw attention from outside the community, they could use a codeword (and request that others do as well) for obvious search keywords—initials of a politician, etc. This is probably not all that reliable—and has the same issue as you mention in your first bullet point.
First point is very good and I hadn’t thought of it. I guess hiding something lessens the chance you get discovered, but always makes you appear more guilty if/when you are. I guess that that is more relevant the more people you think you have digging around for dirt.
Second point: Karma? But that does require you to be logged in of course.
Third: This could be addressed by not making it the choice of the poster, but by requiring a certain number of readers to click a “make this non-public” button. Then it’s more of a community decides kind of thing. Of course if you want to make a non-public post about a controversial topic, you have to rely on others make it so.
Another approach would be to make posts less findable (I’ll add these ideas to the original post too)
There could be a check box for users that added a noindex tag
If someone doesn’t want to draw attention from outside the community, they could use a codeword (and request that others do as well) for obvious search keywords—initials of a politician, etc. This is probably not all that reliable—and has the same issue as you mention in your first bullet point.
I haven’t advertised this, but authors can request noindex status and moderators can set it.