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Comment by seti0Cha | Hacker News Reader

Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter.

I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.

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"Collaborative editing" is table stakes for a modern note editor because even in a single user scenario you will have the same user editing the same note from multiple devices with different levels of connectivity. The product needs a reputation that it will not lose its user's edits, nor will it make annoying branch-style merge conflicts. To do this right you have to treat the other device as an almost-adversarial actor. Unless you want "glitchy" to be in the first sentence people use to describe you.

Very good point, one which I admit didn't come to my mind initially.

Any recommendations for good methods or good open source implementations of this that can be mined for ideas?

CRDTs, and Yjs specifically, are lowering the bar on this. I can't name any products I know are using them, though.

Figma uses CRDT. And Notion has their own thing based on CRDT(not fact checked)

To note, Figma use something inspired by but not quite CRDTs:

> Figma isn't using true CRDTs though. CRDTs are designed for decentralized systems where there is no single central authority to decide what the final state should be. There is some unavoidable performance and memory overhead with doing this. Since Figma is centralized (our server is the central authority), we can simplify our system by removing this extra overhead and benefit from a faster and leaner implementation.

> It’s also worth noting that Figma's data structure isn't a single CRDT. Instead it's inspired by multiple separate CRDTs and uses them in combination to create the final data structure that represents a Figma document.

https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

HedgeDoc uses Y.js under the hood

If you don’t want collaborative editing, don’t use it. I’m saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere when EN couldn’t deliver. It’s easier to add a lock on collaboration than to backfill later.

The problem is that the effort to do collaborative editing creates a lot of other problems.

I want to be able to just start typing, on my phone. Instead, I have to wait for it to sync. If I am in a place with bad reception, that will take a while. It lags and freezes, all in order to support collaboration that I do not want.

I want to add pictures. I want to add links to other notes. I pay for a subscription to get bullet proof cloud backup. Sometimes I want to share notes. I don’t want to collaboratively edit my personal notes with my private thoughts and journal entries.

Evernote stopped focusing on that.

I might switch over to Muse. It was designed to be local first and uses cdrt for sync.

Most EVERNOTE users wanted it? I sincerely doubt that even 20% of Evernote users want that.

People that want a collaborative Docs app already have Google Docs. Evernote is mostly a "digital cabinet". It's where notes and documents go to die (in a good way).

I've used the collaborative feature in google docs only a few times even tho i write google docs like daily. most docs are authored by 1 person. the side comments, however, are invaluable

I think collaborative editing was a mistake. According to Libin circa 2010, Evernote was supposed to be your second brain. Letting other people edit my notes doesn't fit the second brain model (IMHO). I wish Evernote had stayed small and tightly focused on a personal product.

Unfortunately, it's hard to sell to individuals compared to businesses, and so that's where their focus went once they had VC money driving the ship.

In addition to what other posters said, there are opportunity and maintenance costs. Building features for use-cases other than mine puts me in the position of wondering whether my use-case is part of the long term vision for the product. I want a note taking app that strives to improve at capturing quick notes. A document collaboration tool that happens to work pretty well for capturing quick notes is less likely to satisfy me long term.

I agree and disagree. I agree with you because I think they ruined a perfectly good product by trying to turn it into a "collaboration tool" that they could sell big corporate contracts for. On the other hand, I think collaborative editing could have been integrated seamlessly into the product without ruining or even changing the single-player experience.

I agree about the general anti social feature sentiment.

Collaborative editing makes sense for business users (taking meeting notes) and not much for individuals. That said, the tech that enables collaborative editing is kinda the same that allows solid sync and picking up your note taking session on a different device seconds after you put down another, which is something individuals do benefit from.

I like being able to go between my laptop and desktop very fast. Currently with Obsidian and using git for sync it kinda sucks a bit as if I am not careful I get merge conflicts.

I disagree. It even makes sense in a personal environment where I want to collaborate with my wife for example: shared to do lists, shopping lists we edit concurrently, shared ideas for vacations, packing lists, ideas for date nights, important phone numbers in regards to our kids, places and bars we've been to and would recommend to friends and visitors, etc etc.

We regularly collaborate on this stuff and for our intents and purposes, apple notes provides all we need

I have this minset too, but I have one use case for sharing EN notes: when I write articles or short posts which needed to be approved or get an editor touch. I may use Google Docs for it, but there are too many downsides with them compared to EN.

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