This is very neat! The premise (1-1 convos, messages published only on reply) is pretty unique. It's not at all clear to me how that premise is going to lead

This is very neat! The premise (1-1 convos, messages published only on reply) is pretty unique. It's not at all clear to me how that premise is going to lead to more civil conversations, but I am 100% behind people trying out different online conversation mechanics and seeing what falls out of them. Stack overflow, 4chan, twitter, every phpBB ever... the communities they developed were all heavily influenced by the mechanics of interacting with them. I strongly believe that there's plenty of solution space left to explore with the problem of "how do we design interaction mechanics to produce the community we want." I applaud anyone exploring that solution space!