What happened to the days when every community site was running a forum, and every forum had private messaging? It's a strange, strange world we live in.
Facebook and the new web is killing open online communication.
Viewing post in Feature Request: Private Messages
This is not a community site in the sense you are describing it. Those still exist.
Community messaging is not the goal of itch. It is not built around it. To slap it on as an afterthought can be done for small groups where half an admin can deal with anything coming up in their spare time.
It would be different if there was a separate community forum here and you would need to make an extra account. But as it is now, the same account is used for everything. Private messages would be available for anything. To write to developers, to commentators, to random people.
I seen some ugly discussions in public comments on games. If those were be able to be held in private messaging, plus if you could PM developers, that would be that moderation nightmare, that was cited above.
Plus the spamming. They do not have enough staff to sort actual scam malware projects out. What makes you think they would have the staff to handle private messaging? The public forum here is mostly (visibly) handled by one moderator. And that moderator is not staff. Because it is a small forum, the public forum that is.
As I said, the situation might be different, if we would have to make separate accounts for public forum.
Fair enough. But from personal experience I can say that Itch loses a lot for not having this ability to privately communicate between creators/sellers, to form friendly and working relationships.
I can only compare it to DeviantArt -- which is an art gallery site, but it features both private messages and a forum, encouraging collaboration between artists.
In the old days, there were a lot of creative community sites like this: Elfwood, DeviantArt, Voice Acting Alliance... They all had private messaging, as well as forums and comments. You could contact any fellow creator on the site (on DA, the only surviving one of these big three, you still can), and help each other and form creative working relationships. I see Itch as such a site/community, too.
I understand the current restraints, I just think Itch is losing something valuable because of those restraints. Everyone is kept isolated from each other, and doing things for themselves. This limits level of creativity and creative production on the platform. But that's just my two cents. I understand what you're saying. Ultimately, it's up to the management to decide if it's worth upscaling or not, and what they want the user experience and community to be like.
Oh, it could be different, if there were certain infra structure elements. Mostly multiplayer and a unified client. Look at Steam for a feature list.
As for da, well, uhm. how do I say this
They do sport that scaling mechanic I believe is the main reason for itch to not have that feature. The more people use the social media feature, the more money comes in.