3 ms·

Been a while since I’ve touched observable (not a criticism, just that I’m out of the loop) and didn’t know or forgot they had free tier private notebooks. Doe

by maegul 4y ago

Been a while since I’ve touched observable (not a criticism, just that I’m out of the loop) and didn’t know or forgot they had free tier private notebooks. Doesn’t seem to me to be a big deal and a relatively normal way to differentiate free and paid accounts for such a service/SaaS. Anyone have insights on the broader implications though? Business is struggling? Are they being outcompeted by other “notebook” offerings? I’d guess their integration with cloud services would be subpar given that they themselves, last I heard, ran on Heroku and so may never have seen cloud integration as a priority. Is the visualisation and JS focus not paying off in data analytics or data science at least for enterprise? It wouldn’t surprise me (though I have no idea) that they got VC with big goals but would have been better off as a small boutique company.

londons_explore 4y ago
Github was the same for a while right? You had to pay for privacy...
cxr 4y ago
> Doesn’t seem to me to be a big deal and a relatively normal way to differentiate free and paid accounts for such a service/SaaS. I'm not steeped in the Observable ecosystem either, but it's worth thinking clearly about what "public" means to not conflate things that are not by their nature inherently joined. If a notebook has to be public because your account is on the free tier, then that alone is maybe not so bad. But what Observable seems to have adopted, just like many others, is a forced social layer indexed by actor on top of their hosted notebook editor/depository. For a notebook to be "public", by reasonable inference that involves the ability for anyone who comes across it to be able to view it (and in the case here, probably easily fork it). So far, no big deal. Observable, however, just like GitHub until fairly recently, indexes all of your work and then makes that public, too. That's what not having access to private notebooks really means—not being able exercise control over the social aggregator to stop it from putting things in the public graph it makes available to everyone whether you asked to do that or not. It's a little bit creepy how we've just taken this as a given without really noticing the distinction. The example I always use to make the distinction clear is that when I'm at the post office or the grocery store or wherever, then I'm in public. Those are public places; if you see me around, fine. But what's not happening is that there's not an omnipresent observer following me around to keep a record: "First they went to the grocery store, and then they went to the post office, and then they went back home and stayed there for 6 hours, and then[...]" And it doesn't then take those records and casually publish it for anyone who asks for it. Because that would be fucking creepy, right? See <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-january.html#unlinked-identity https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...>
- runlaszlorun 4y ago
  > And it doesn't then take those records and casually publish it for anyone who asks for it. Because that would be fucking creepy, right? Or you’d be Google Maps…
  - cxr 4y ago
    There are two things that make that different: 1. You can turn off Location History if you want. (It should perhaps not be turned on by default, but the option to turn it off is there, at least.) 2. The data that is collected by Android devices is private—Google isn't actually making it available to "anyone who asks". In that regard it's a personal aid akin to your browser history and rather unlike your profile on social networking sites like GitHub—who only (frighteningly recently) just began to allow you to change your privacy settings to prevent them from publishing a public index of your activity across their site.
- maegul 4y ago
  FWIW I agree. Limiting the total number of notebooks the free tier provides, incl. private notebooks, would probably be a much more humane policy.

by maegul 4y ago

londons_explore 4y ago

Github was the same for a while right? You had to pay for privacy...

cxr 4y ago

> Doesn’t seem to me to be a big deal and a relatively normal way to differentiate free and paid accounts for such a service/SaaS. I'm not steeped in the Observable ecosystem either, but it's worth thinking clearly about what "public" means to not conflate things that are not by their nature inherently joined. If a notebook has to be public because your account is on the free tier, then that alone is maybe not so bad. But what Observable seems to have adopted, just like many others, is a forced social layer indexed by actor on top of their hosted notebook editor/depository. For a notebook to be "public", by reasonable inference that involves the ability for anyone who comes across it to be able to view it (and in the case here, probably easily fork it). So far, no big deal. Observable, however, just like GitHub until fairly recently, indexes all of your work and then makes that public, too. That's what not having access to private notebooks really means—not being able exercise control over the social aggregator to stop it from putting things in the public graph it makes available to everyone whether you asked to do that or not. It's a little bit creepy how we've just taken this as a given without really noticing the distinction. The example I always use to make the distinction clear is that when I'm at the post office or the grocery store or wherever, then I'm in public. Those are public places; if you see me around, fine. But what's not happening is that there's not an omnipresent observer following me around to keep a record: "First they went to the grocery store, and then they went to the post office, and then they went back home and stayed there for 6 hours, and then[...]" And it doesn't then take those records and casually publish it for anyone who asks for it. Because that would be fucking creepy, right? See <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-january.html#unlinked-identity https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan...>

runlaszlorun 4y ago
> And it doesn't then take those records and casually publish it for anyone who asks for it. Because that would be fucking creepy, right? Or you’d be Google Maps…
- cxr 4y ago
  There are two things that make that different: 1. You can turn off Location History if you want. (It should perhaps not be turned on by default, but the option to turn it off is there, at least.) 2. The data that is collected by Android devices is private—Google isn't actually making it available to "anyone who asks". In that regard it's a personal aid akin to your browser history and rather unlike your profile on social networking sites like GitHub—who only (frighteningly recently) just began to allow you to change your privacy settings to prevent them from publishing a public index of your activity across their site.
maegul 4y ago
FWIW I agree. Limiting the total number of notebooks the free tier provides, incl. private notebooks, would probably be a much more humane policy.