alt Hacker NewsI developed a TinyMUCK-based messaging system like this.
You see, the original TinyMUD eventually had a "whisper" command where you could send a private message to someone in the same room. They also had a "page" command where you could summon someone remotely, and it did not originally send a message. People hacked this command by renaming their room so that the name of the room was the message.
Eventually, "page" and "whisper" converged as providing the same functionality. And of course we had "say" and "pose" commands for public in-room communication. What we didn't have was a command for excluding one or more persons from the conversation.
So I invented the "mutter" command. If you typed "+mutter <player>=<message>" then everyone in the room would see your message, except for the player(s) named on the command-line.
It was extraordinarily rude and tacky, and therefore an unmitigated success, and became well-integrated and nearly well-known as "whisper" after awhile. Obviously, Facebook and other social media have merely followed my lead!
Look, I'm not proud of my legacy as a hacker, but sometimes you give people what they want...
Interesting, as a LambdaMOO user -- which borrowed many of the forms of TinyMUD but in its own lineage -- I wasn't aware of this earlier form of "page";
On LambdaMOO (and LambdaCore) whisper was for in-room communication and "page" sent a message to someone privately anywhere on the MOO. In reality nobody used whisper. I never knew there was a form of page that didn't carry a message.
Things like your "mutter" were easy to code up in MOO, and I recall people doing things like this, but it being seriously seriously frowned upon.
BTW you might be interested in my project https://github.com/timbran-project/moor