[HN Gopher] Observable transitions to paid plan for private note...
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Observable transitions to paid plan for private notebooks
Author : gampleman
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-10-13 08:07 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (observablehq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (observablehq.com)
| gampleman wrote:
| I was expecting this move, since what seemed like plan A (i.e.
| get companies to pay for team collaboration features) was quite a
| tough sell in my experience. I've been using Observable for work
| for quite a while, but generally my colleagues have not been
| interested in collaborating on any of my notebooks - they tend to
| consume them, not produce them.
|
| In the meantime the completely free model for using it seemed
| overly generous given that. Hence we've reached plan B.
|
| I was hoping for at least a limited number of private notebooks,
| or at least unlisted notebooks, since that would make it a bit
| easier to use for prototyping private stuff...
| kar1181 wrote:
| The SaaS crunch continues. I don't have an objective datapoint
| but over the past few weeks have noticed many of the 'free' apps
| I use have made significant changes to the free tier and
| increased pricing.
| dahfizz wrote:
| VC money is drying up, and many of these startups are going to
| fail because they don't have any sort of foundation as a
| business. They don't have a product people are willing to pay
| for.
| aliqot wrote:
| > They don't have a product people are willing to pay for.
|
| this resonated with me deeply. use =/= pay for, and that
| distinction wasn't clear for me at first until I had my first
| taste of saas ownership.
| xani_ wrote:
| Or they do but they have so many people invested in not
| developing the core product but "growth" that it is
| unsustainable
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Part of the reason people don't want to pay is VCs kept
| funding new startups that give things away. As that stops
| happening, paid tiers should start to become normal again,
| and we can all live happily ever after. But it's bad timing
| for startups on free tiers who are starting to need money
| right now.
| TillE wrote:
| Even if VCs get frustrated, giant companies will still have
| little difficulty operating free services as a vague loss-
| leader strategy, like Microsoft with OneNote or whatever.
|
| That stuff will still exist as competition for any startup.
| cxr wrote:
| One way to ameliorate the effects of the "SaaS crunch" (as a
| user, i.e. potential casualty) is to stop establishing path
| dependencies on services altogether when a document is
| sufficient for the problem at hand. In the case here, that
| isn't as difficult of a mental leap compared to other things,
| because of what they are from the very start: _notebooks_.
|
| These are documents; what we're talking about is something that
| you can prepare on your own machine and then ship off to
| somewhere else when it's time to share--whether that's by
| dumping it onto your own Web space, or attaching to an email.
|
| It should have never been the case that e.g. classrooms, etc.
| were standardizing on a single service provider to handle this
| problem in the first place.
| aliqot wrote:
| also unhelpful is using VC funds to run unprofitable business
| plans. If the service requires a huge free tier to be viable,
| then its not a great plan.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Yeah, this seems dumb or at least short sighted. If you make it
| free for individuals, but limit collaboration, then you get
| those users arguing for their companies to buy the service,
| which is where the real money is.
| danuker wrote:
| Due to inflation, the central banks slowed lending to the
| government, driving rates up.
|
| More expensive credit means less free offers attempting to lure
| customers in.
| mbo wrote:
| This is frankly a disastrous impact to the usability of
| Observable notebooks for Free Individuals (the new free tier).
| From the FAQ (https://talk.observablehq.com/t/faq-
| october-2022-platform-ch...) Q: With live public
| notebooks, is there a way to stage edits before making them
| public? [...] For Free users, we also recommend that
| they fork the notebook (which would be public), make the edits
| and merge the changes back. Although the forked notebooks
| would be public, it would be a temporary notebook which could be
| deleted once merged.
|
| So Free Individuals just have to... break their live notebooks if
| they want to edit them?
|
| Like fine, kneecap your free product if you really need to force
| people to fork over cash. But Observable purports to be a
| platform that is trying to democratise data analysis and
| visualisation for the masses. Feels a bit like Wikipedia adding
| its own paid tier.
| turtlebits wrote:
| There's no such thing as "free". Companies just are subsidizing
| consumer acquisition costs, until they decide not to.
| designpatternz wrote:
| > Observable purports to be a platform that is trying to
| democratise data analysis and visualisation for the masses.
|
| It is for profit
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Wikipedia adding its own paid tier.
|
| I wouldn't put it past them... "Subscribe to Wikipedia Pro
| today, to see the most up to date articles (the free tier only
| gets to see 2 year old articles)."
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Wikipedia adding its own paid tier._
|
| Wikipedia does have a paid tier! It's a way that very large
| companies which consume Wikipedia data can query it more
| efficiently: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/22/23178245/google-paying-wi...
| designpatternz wrote:
| Not a fan of how D3.js "examples" from the web page take you to
| the Observable "way" of doing things. Not a fan of observable.
|
| It's free, so I can't complain.
| Myrmornis wrote:
| Yes, this was a big change and quite a shock for anyone
| expecting to be able to use the docs to learn d3 for use in
| traditional web apps, the way they used to use the d3 docs.
|
| Personally I think what happened is that the DOM-manipulating
| and animation parts of d3 (but not the utility libraries)
| became existentially threatened by the rise of the component-
| based reactive JS frameworks, and the d3 authors made the
| reasonable decision to accept that, explicitly target a data
| science and academic audience, and create a for-profit company
| aligned with it. Maintaining docs targeting both use cases
| would have been expensive, and would have threatened the
| quality of the docs associated with their primary focus
| (observable), so they made the decision to accept that the docs
| would now be quite awkward for the traditional web app use
| case.
| rob74 wrote:
| One side effect of "verbifying" nouns is that you can misread the
| title: Observable (adjective) transitions (noun, plural) etc.
| maegul wrote:
| 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.
| cxr wrote:
| > 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-
| jan...>
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| FWIW I agree. Limiting the total number of notebooks the free
| tier provides, incl. private notebooks, would probably be a
| much more humane policy.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Github was the same for a while right? You had to pay for
| privacy...
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Well I hope this doesn't auto convert my currently private
| notebook with lots of private data into public mode...
| throwamon wrote:
| A few interesting reactive notebooks off the top of my head:
|
| - Pluto.jl (Julia)
|
| - Clerk (Clojure)
|
| - Polynote (Scala, Python?)
|
| - Percival (Datalog + JavaScript)
|
| As for Observable, note the runtime is open source. I don't know
| any perfectly polished alternatives that use it, but for now
| there's Starboard.gg (which if I'm not mistaken uses Observable's
| runtime, but someone else said it doesn't), and this VSCode
| extension:
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GordonSm...
|
| I'd love to see more alternatives in this space, specifically of
| _reactive_ notebooks or similar environments.
| lf-non wrote:
| starboard is an active open-source alternative.
|
| https://starboard.gg/gz
|
| https://github.com/gzuidhof/starboard-notebook
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Looks like it has the non-reactive Jupyter style notebook as
| opposed to the reactive-style Observable one though. I do
| prefer the latter by a large margin to be honest. Are there any
| plans to also support reactive notebooks?
| lf-non wrote:
| There is a starboard-observable package which uses the same
| open-source reactive runtime as observablehq
|
| https://github.com/gzuidhof/starboard-observable
| throwamon wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I read some time ago that Starboard used
| Observable's open source runtime. Has that changed?
| YousefED wrote:
| I'm working on an open source notebook with built-in support
| for React and Typescript. It also comes with a built-in
| reactivity model and evaluate-as-you-type. To be open sourced
| soon, but preview version already available at
| https://www.typecell.org
| endisneigh wrote:
| This is a great move. Everything should be open.
| mturk wrote:
| I have to think through how this will impact my usage of
| observable when teaching. I'm not sure how I feel about asking my
| students to utilize it if part of using it is that all of their
| notebooks are instantly public, or if that will run afoul of
| university-level policies about disclosing class rosters etc.
|
| I suppose that is exactly the reason that they offer educational
| programs, but for my class size and the resources available for
| my classes I'm not sure that is available to me.
| kemitchell wrote:
| Is sounds like you're using for education without taking the
| deal they offer for education.
|
| If the terms of that program aren't workable, they can lose
| you. But freeloading is almost by definition precarious
| business.
| mturk wrote:
| I mean, I guess I should have been more obviously self-aware
| in my original post, but yes, my intent in that comment was
| explicitly to bemoan that I was not able to take the deal
| they offer for education and that my precarious freeloading
| led to a change in plans.
| DefineOutside wrote:
| Repl.it is being used at my college for the programming
| languages. It's nice to share code and not have to setup a
| programming environment, but I'll admit to at some point simply
| viewing the forks of an assignment as all the forks are public,
| and copying some of their code to get my assignment to work.
|
| The usernames don't have to respond to a specific user on
| repl.it so I guess there's no violations as long as students
| don't use their real names.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I "released" a bunch of my class projects as open source and
| nearly ran afoul of plagiarism accusations (of my own stuff)
| even though at the time (pre-GitHub) my stuff was only in darcs
| repos on my own hosts and was generally hard to find. (That
| ultimately was what saved me in that it was very obvious these
| were indeed my own files and also that I wasn't posting them
| for other people/classmates to cheat off me but for my own
| usage and/or sometimes team collaboration.)
|
| I realize there's a lot of interesting ethics boundaries on
| public software projects during education. I've always been
| "pro-open science" that more student projects should be open
| source/allowed to be open source as "teaching tools in the
| round", but am sympathetic also to how easily that can be
| abused for cheating or plagiarizing. I think it is an
| interesting discussion with no easy answers.
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| I am sympathetic. From someone who completed his degree in the
| last decade, I offer my perspective on this sort of thing.
|
| When I completed my degree and got the eventual one year look
| back survey, I actually called out the explosion in faculty
| electing to use third party services which weren't vetted by or
| supported by the university. One of my chief complaints was
| that students had no recourse other than to agree to arbitrary
| terms and sometimes pay arbitrary amounts to companies that
| were clearly monetizing our data.
|
| (Although that last part isn't as much a concern here.)
|
| I can imagine if I was required to use something that made my
| coursework public, I would have simply gone to the CISO Office
| or the Student Ombudsman if not offered an alternative.
| mturk wrote:
| I'll be honest and say that I - not even that long ago - held
| similar attitudes and slowly made a series of compromises (to
| myself) that led to this point. While I'm not sure I fully
| regret it I do think it was ... not as well-considered as I'd
| like. ("I don't even know who you are anymore!" he said into
| the mirror.)
|
| We mostly use a locally-hosted jupyterhub, but for JS work
| often used other environments. For JS, we made the switch to
| observable from iodide (after it was wound down) and I think
| I will re-evaluate platforms again, including JS kernels in
| Jupyter.
| Hardwired8976 wrote:
| Offering a free pro subscription for students like Jetbrains
| for example.
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