I agree broadly with the article’s position but I think locks are more harmful than helpful. When I was a Quip user (2018) it was super frustrating to get locked out of a paragraph because someone’s cursor idled there. Instead just allow LWW overwrites. If users have contention and your sync & presence is fast, they’ll figure it out pretty quick, and at most lose 1-2 keystrokes, or one drag gesture, or one color pick.
Notion is “collaborative” and we don’t use a CRDT for text, it’s all last-write-wins decided by the server. However our LWW texts are individually small - one block/paragraph in size - and adding/moving/removing blocks is intention-preserving if not perfectly convergent.
As the article says, the downside for LWW is that “offline” / async collaboration isn’t so great. That’s why we’re working on switching to CRDT for our texts. If you’re interested in bringing CRDTs to a product with a lot of users, consider joining Notion’s Docs team - https://boards.greenhouse.io/notion/jobs/5602426003 / @jitl on Twitter / [email protected]
Notion is “collaborative” and we don’t use a CRDT for text, it’s all last-write-wins decided by the server. However our LWW texts are individually small - one block/paragraph in size - and adding/moving/removing blocks is intention-preserving if not perfectly convergent.
As the article says, the downside for LWW is that “offline” / async collaboration isn’t so great. That’s why we’re working on switching to CRDT for our texts. If you’re interested in bringing CRDTs to a product with a lot of users, consider joining Notion’s Docs team - https://boards.greenhouse.io/notion/jobs/5602426003 / @jitl on Twitter / [email protected]