The Butter Thesis (2019)

We use it at work and honestly I'd rather have Google Docs. Very limited formatting (why are there only 3 levels of headings?), very slow interface (why does it take what feels like 30s to load a folder with 25 entries in it?) and the search feature might as well not exist. When I write a Quip doc I basically have to realize and rationalize to myself that I am not going to be able to find it again in the future. So much time lost to "anyone else have the link to...". It's a black hole that allows real time collaborative editing and comments. Sometimes they'll have spells of a few hours to weeks where comments or edits are randomly lost. Randomly the UI will also pop up a 500 or 503 error, which never inspires confidence that it is actually saving my edits. I basically do all my writing in markdown locally, then copy it into Quip — both so I have a local copy I can full text search on and so that if it has one of its random fits I don't lose a half day of work.

(You can also very easily get the UI in an inconsistent state. I forget what the exact sequence is for the one I found most recently but it is something like: if you position your cursor after an image, and there is an empty line and then a line with a header, and you press forward delete, it'll get rid of both line and the header. Clicking undo won't get the header back, it'll only reappear when you refresh the page)