Comment by menacingly
2 years ago
This is really nice, but I think the perennial curse of technology people is producing "<app>, but with <esoteric principle>"
People want a thing, not an ideal, and they'll sell their soul to get the thing. At this point, it's actually being surprised by this that is the ludicrous position. Philosophies are a differentiator for a very small portion of population.
If you want them to buy into ideals, you've taken on two problems: Make a thing they want with its own differentiators outside of the noble pursuit, _and_ trojan in your principles.
(co-founder of anytype)
we agree, we have an internal mantra "people use products, not protocols". This does not diminish the importance of philosophies. The way we design our product and protocols is based on principles, because of the role software started to play in our lives - the second order consequences of the architectural choices lead to the results we get in our social life. We are believers of fundamental digital freedoms (privacy, ability to connect with those we trust) and importance of user and creator autonomy from the software provider (these freedoms to be governed by us not by software companies). We used these principles to guide our architectural decisions.
At the same time, we fully understand that if we want to build something meaningful we need to do the hardest part. Turn our ideals into the UX that would be attractive on its own. We are focusing on that. Hope to show that the p2p protocols can turned into a product that is fun to use. We are just making our baby steps towards this (not there yet)
Normally I would agree with this.
But with Notion in particular, and how heavily they're pushing Notion AI, I could see some c-level exec types being uncomfortable with the idea of Notion (or any managed/hosted service) to store trade secrets, company IP, etc.
When a company is pushing AI features as heavily as Notion is, it raises questions how Notion is planning to (or already using) your private data for fine tuning, model training, potentially scooping up your company's IP in the process.
Those who don’t think it matters already have a choice of great products. We try to build a better alternative to those who think it does. We also think it’s our job to make the ux great, to make sn analogy we think a healthy and tasty food is a better value proposition which for a network is very important.
> People want a thing, not an ideal...
So, welcome to Hacker News, where the particular esoteric principles discussed here are critically important for many of us. This is very much a selling point in this market.
You're on a forum for hackers, so most of the people here are the ones that care about the specifics of technology.
> You're on a forum for hackers
I wish. "Hacker" news has nothing to do with that.
Highly recommend using the search box, New, etc.
This is true, and I sometimes wonder if the only true solution is regulation or overhauling IP or such. But I don't see that happening, because proprietary software is too large and frankly libre software isn't asshole-proof enough for capitalism.
My preference would be using this tendency the other way. Make it so good they can't resist it, even if they accidentally eat their vegetables along the way.