callumlocke

Dear downvoters, it’s a joke.

> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least. I like the way it forces a moment of consideration of what’s there before I dive in. And iterative edit–review–edit cycles help me to keep making macro progress instead of fiddling with irrelevant details. (I’ve not tried Notion though.)

Ignore the negativity, your comment helped me.

I think the commenter was just trying to be helpful.

Having a limited supply of empathy is one way to think about this, but another (less immediately appealing) way is as fast moving moral fashions. In your example it seems like the empathy got ‘used up’, because of the order of those two events, but I think that sort of thing often happens the other way round too, in which cases it’s harder to tell ourselves stories about why. Maybe the best explanation is it’s mostly arbitrary. That’s the problem with relying on public charity and the feel-good factor as a mechanism for helping the worst off. Moral fashions are like weather – somewhat predictable, but not definitely not reliable or consistent.

Maybe it helps them in some way with legal compliance, or just PR (gives them an easy way to fob off people with concerns), the benefits of which would significantly outweigh the lost revenue from the miniscule percentage of Chrome users who will install this.

> for the average user

> If a law is bad when enforced, then the law needs to be changed, not the enforcement.

Useful as a rule of thumb but it's not always true. Models are never perfect, the map is not the territory. We are constantly figuring out what our shared values are, and it's a moving target. And the body of law itself is a complex beast with its own surprising dynamics. It's part of an ecosystem. You can't wave away its complexity with such a simplistic ideal.

A given law may be 'bad' (regrettable, even draconian/immoral) when enforced in certain cases, and yet it may also be unfeasible to change that law to add those cases as exceptions. This is why the law gives judges flexibility on sentencing, for example.

Good UX depends on audience and context. Many things are widely shared precisely because they give the user something fun and unexpected.

For people who work with computers all day, being online is more perfunctory, and the pleasure of seeing something fun/different rarely outweighs the annoyance of the interruption or of having to figure out an unconventional UI. But that's not everyone.

Doing what? All I see is the Wikipedia article for the TLD.