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