Hacker News Reader

Comment by lopkeny12ko | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else feel that the whole entire-canvas-is-editable-by-default approach of Notion and similar tools is an extremely annoying antipattern?

I want to be able to open a document in read-only mode. Otherwise, while just navigating through pages or reading content, it's far too easy to accidentally add text to a block by pressing anything on the keyboard, or move things around with an accidental drag of the mouse.

I've been reprimanded several times for errant edits to company wiki pages because of this...

View on HN

First time I had a job that used Confluence as an idle tick i would just tick-untick-tick-untick the checkboxes on documents. I never realised that a) i was actually editing and saving the page, and b) it would send an email to the owner for every single tick/untick edit.

That surprised me when using GitHub too.

that's hilarious, how did you eventually find out?

He ticked off the wrong people.

ROFL

LMAO

I, too, have earned the hate of a few dev teams not understanding the Confluence view of the world. I have bought numerous beers in hopes of patching things over.

I agree, I think for shared docs easy edit-ability/instant-autosave is an antipattern that encourages less-thoughtful editing and hurts their purpose as a long-term store of knowledge. The places I've worked that have really leaned into that part of Notion (vs just like Notion as a nativeish-app/snappier Wiki) were all overly ADHD in their approach to planning and work in general, too.

There's a certain sort of worker that really leans into that as their version of "easy async collaboration" but is actually just putting the burden on the recipients to make sense of the author's journey and thought process, instead of putting more effort into more-infrequent-but-more-curated updates.

I think you can lock a page to prevent editing on Notion, but I'm not sure if that's something only the owner of the document can do. A dedicated read-only mode would be useful though.

If the company doesn’t want you editing pages, they should be locking them down. If the pages are left open I feel that it is safe to assume the right to edit. And I’d argue that until my boss absolutely hated me.

https://www.notion.so/help/sharing-and-permissions

It's totally reasonable for an FAQ page that is editable by all developers and intended for everyone to contribute troubleshooting tips.

The problem occurs when someone accidentally drags things around, or has the wrong window open when typing in text and you end up with "ls" and "exit" scattered randomly throughout the doc.

I have never once in my life intentionally dragged text. Unintentionally several times, and each time wondering what kind of deranged person designed this misfeature.

.. okay it’s mostly a misfeature because it’s the exact same input gesture as selecting text, but you have to remember that there is text selected / ensure that no text has been inadvertently selected.

Another case where making the user remember things can cause a problem is hybrid cars, where the driver needs to know the state of the hybrid battery because the responsiveness of the brakes and acceleration change depending on it.

> has the wrong window open when typing in text and you end up with "ls" and "exit" scattered randomly throughout the doc.

the same thing would happen in word/google docs/etc

> If the pages are left open I feel that it is safe to assume the right to edit

Yes, but not accidentally. You should press an [Edit] button which would take you to another URL to edit the page.

No, it's an editor, not a immutable website for consumption. The whole goal of them is that you can switch fast between editing and the rendered result. In that sense they are like word processors. But yes, adding an option for locking the document can be important, and usually they have them. I mean it's not even hard to implement. But probably not something people are mindful about.

I mean, an immutable website for consumption is exactly what most people want. I want to differentiate content editing and content viewing much the same way in software development you edit source code which is then built into an immutable read-only artifact.

Is it really such a foreign concept that people want a dedicated editing-focused mode whose source is published into the final wiki page for viewing? Is this not how basically all tools worked pre-Notion?

> I mean, an immutable website for consumption is exactly what most people want.

Do they? Then export your documents to an immutable website. That's why those options exist. Personally I don't want that. I want to edit my content fast and the hybrid-solution doesn't bother me. So we are talking here about a conflict of interest, not an anti-pattern. And solutions for this already exist, maybe they should just advertised more prominently?

> I want to differentiate content editing and content viewing much the same way in software development you edit source code which is then built into an immutable read-only artifact.

I don't read the compiled artifact, I use it, which is very different from what we are talking here. A more equal example would be reading code on github or reading in a code editor.

Many tools that predate Notion open pages in "edit" mode: Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Google Docs, Etherpad, Dropbox Paper, TextEdit, Nodepad.exe...

We want to serve people who've used apps like those with their preferred writing experience.

but those required clicking on save to actually make a change.

Microsoft Word no longer does it, at least not for a typical experience - that is, opening a file you sourced from elsewhere (Internet, or your company's Exchange server, or e-mail attachment, or ...). Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will all open the document in "Protected View", indicated by an ugly yellow bar above the document with an [Enable Editing] button in the middle. Sure, it's done for security reasons, but for actual user experience, it's almost equivalent to opening all files in read-only mode by default.

This would be fine except for the fact that all changes are instantly committed in realtime, which is such an incredible usability antipattern.

If Notion had to be everything-editable-by-default, make it so that changes need to be explicitly committed and saved, much the same way one would do with Git. Otherwise it becomes impossible to track down these kinds of accidental mutations to the document, much less even realize that they have occurred.

Also, pointing to existing tools with glaring usability problems is not a justification for creating yet another tool with those same usability problems, amplified.

> I want to differentiate content editing and content viewing much the same way in software development you edit source code which is then built into an immutable read-only artifact.

On that note, I'm increasingly considering making my Emacs open all files read-only by default. When coding, I'm usually viewing many more individual documents than I end up actually editing - and multiple times a day, I end up accidentally typing (and then immediately deleting - muscle memory, this) a character into some file I was reading - and causing a spike in CPU usage, as the Language Server tries to reprocess the change. $deity forbid I do this in a widely-used header file - if I'm not quick with undo, LSP will churn through dozens of translation units before it realizes the edits were reverted.

This is not a big deal - usually just the cooling fans spinning up for a few seconds, and the editor (or whole system) getting slightly less responsive. It's just that the "slightly less responsive" part is really jarring.

Word processors typically a view-only mode (and often a suggest/comment mode as well.)

Absolutely. When I’m using Notion I feel like I have to be hyperaware of how I interact with the page as to not unintentionally edit something.

A little editor/reader toggle button would go a long way here.

Most developers think in abstract terms all the time. We can easily see the variables take shape and create our intended reality.

But for a lot of people that never do that, that's hard, the more closer edit mode is to reality to easier it is to understand what it will look like and the less brainpower it takes the creator. But yeah in some cases with notion the difference between read and edit mode is not significantly indicated.

I find it irritating at times but nowhere near as infuriating as traveling to the top of a large block to click edit. I'd happily accept a less permeable barrier into edit mode (like ctrl-click?) but it needs to still support the instant edits for these apps to be tools primarily instead of document readers.

I'm sure there's a very nice UX convention for this waiting to be discovered through some creative prototyping and user testing.

Spitballing bad ideas somewhere in the ball park of what could be prototyped: - Editing locked by default and locked whenever a clear non editing action occurs. Editing unlocked by right swipe, double click, enter key or something similar. Editing unlocked by looking at the text cursor.

I confess to having never used Notion, but if you want a horrorshow experience with "everyone can edit by default", check out Mural some time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com