louisvgchi

You don’t need to know about integration to make a platformer. That’s an absurd thing to say. I think this is called gatekeeping. “You couldn’t possibly participate in X without first having these credentials that I specify.”

I’ve seen this message over and over again because I have a hacker news RSS feed of the word “spreadsheet”. I’ve flagged this post because it feels like Groundhog Day with this spam. Stop please!

How do you plan to make money? Consulting?

I guess I can add Notion to my list of companies that ignore its customers unless shamed on social media. One to avoid.

You shouldn’t have to publicly shame a company on hacker news to make them be baseline level good to their customers.

But many tech companies are like that once they scale up.

Having no say in having to use any piece of software is a straightforward way to make people hate it.

I do think of tests as a kind of double accounting.

How do you plan to make money and sustain vitality from this open source offering?

Open source has a lot of overhead, and if you offer “enterprise” versions, others will compete with you, or worse, Amazon may offer your service for free as a bundle.

I’m interested in hearing your plan.

I liked the part where they talked about the blocks with the blocks and the block blocks and how they all block together.

I thought the reference to field pioneers was a bit much, I wouldn’t have the blocks to do that with a straight face. I wish these app makers (see also Figma, AirTable) would refrain from making their self-aggrandizing “we’re bringing computing to the masses”; what a load of blocks. What you’re doing is creating a product (another silo in waiting) serving a market that presently is interested. This block model is also not unique (see WordPress and Drupal): Notion may be refining some of that in a more seamless experience, but this is a different kind of statement. Perhaps “we added collaboration to blocks” would be a possible claim for uniqueness.

Aside from this, I found the technical decisions interesting and worth a read.

Would you like to set permissions per column? Read-write-modify?

What in particular did you not like about their API?

Bubble sort was perfectly natural to me before I learned about algorithms. I think your “fairly strong collection of evidence” is weak. We teach it because it’s a study in how not to sort, most of the time.

Similar things said of Drupal.

Why moving away from AirTable? Pricing or feature set?