Steemit is a social platform, it only makes sense, If you can communicate with fellow stemians on the platform, i know there are other platforms where you can chat like discord, but think of it, it only makes it easier and better to have a direct message feature here on steemit.
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Private messages can't be sent here, this reduces the level of communication to just comments, and just comments isn't enough. You have to find out if a user is on discord if you want to chat, and I don't see asking a user for his/her username on public comments as being safe. Not sure this is a bug, but i'm guessing it was deliberately left out for a purpose, that which i will gladly love to know
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Some post on steemit are so overwhelming, and you want to get to the user personally, not everybody feel secure about leaving their username on public comments, I won't!
Would have submitted this suggestion to Utopian.io, but someone has made a suggestion on it already, and yet nothing has been done about it.
Lets hope something is being worked out. What do you think, won't you like to see direct message feature on steemit?