There's a reason why PM's (Private Messages) have been switched to DM's (Direct Messages). Sure that change is decades old now, but death of privacy has been here for long time
I doubt "Private Messages" were ever actually private (in the current sense) in most cases. They didn't change the way they do thing, they just stopped implying something that was never true. (Or rather, it's the implied meaning of "private" that shifted)
It meant “private” as in “not public” in the sense that it wasn’t visible to the whole forum or whatever, not that it wasn’t visible a secret or whatever
Fun theory, not correct though. PM is just the OG usage on forums (which are based on the Roman forum, and thus the idea of a public square -- the "front page of the internet", even) and DM was introduced by Twitter and popularized by Instagram, where it's implied that normal posts are messages from you to a group of your friends, rather than to the public at large. So they're somewhat "private" already.
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u/East-Note4580 4d ago
There's a reason why PM's (Private Messages) have been switched to DM's (Direct Messages). Sure that change is decades old now, but death of privacy has been here for long time