When thinking about somebody’s post, I often benefit from writing out my thoughts. Usually, I do that in a comment box, because that’s convenient.
Often, I’ll realize that my first thought is wrong, hit on something I want to read before posting, not have time to finish my thought, or feel growing uncertainty about whether it’s worthwhile investing the time to finish my comment. I don’t want to keep track of a bunch of half-formed thoughts on, say, Google Drive. So I delete the comment instead.
It would be nice if I could easily make and save a bunch of hidden comments on the post itself. They’d be essentially “draft comments.”
It's not advertised afaik, but this feature kinda already exists. If you type stuff into the comment input, close the tab, and reopen it, you will see "You have autosaved text. Restore". When you click "Restore", you get your text back, so this functions as the sort of draft you are describing, I think.
It's still possible that a more official version of this draft functionality would be worthwhile though.
That feels like a separate feature to me, but it's always tricky say where to draw the lines. The reason I feel this way is because being able to have the draft/autosave for a given post adds value on it's own. If it didn't add value on it's own and the value got "unlocked" by having that list of draft comments, I'd see them both as belonging to a single feature.
My model of most users says that the list of draft comments wouldn't be too valuable... (read more)