Dear downvoters, it’s a joke.

> Likewise, wouldn’t you be baffled if you needed to click a “Start Editing” button in Word or Google Docs?

Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least. I like the way it forces a moment of consideration of what’s there before I dive in. And iterative edit–review–edit cycles help me to keep making macro progress instead of fiddling with irrelevant details. (I’ve not tried Notion though.)

Interesting. I'd like that for Notes.app which is my go-to example for how transparent autosave + always-editable can fail catastrophically.

Once I had a very long list in Notes.app that I'd been maintaining over a few years. One day while scrolling it on mobile, I somehow replaced the entire document with some stray input, and by the time I noticed, undo couldn't restore it. Though I was able to recover it because my laptop (which Notes.app will sync to) hadn't yet connected to the internet.

> Interestingly that’s exactly what Apple Pages does now, on phone/tablet at least.

Same in google docs mobile app. Edit button in the bottom right corner.

I agree that in touch this makes more sense because edit and scroll use identical inputs (drag finger over document)

Ignore the negativity, your comment helped me.

I think the commenter was just trying to be helpful.

Agree. A quicker if not elegant alternative is to cancel the page load after the article appears. Typically works for any site that's using JS to hide/erase content already served.

Having a limited supply of empathy is one way to think about this, but another (less immediately appealing) way is as fast moving moral fashions. In your example it seems like the empathy got ‘used up’, because of the order of those two events, but I think that sort of thing often happens the other way round too, in which cases it’s harder to tell ourselves stories about why. Maybe the best explanation is it’s mostly arbitrary. That’s the problem with relying on public charity and the feel-good factor as a mechanism for helping the worst off. Moral fashions are like weather – somewhat predictable, but not definitely not reliable or consistent.

Maybe it helps them in some way with legal compliance, or just PR (gives them an easy way to fob off people with concerns), the benefits of which would significantly outweigh the lost revenue from the miniscule percentage of Chrome users who will install this.

> for the average user

> If a law is bad when enforced, then the law needs to be changed, not the enforcement.

Useful as a rule of thumb but it's not always true. Models are never perfect, the map is not the territory. We are constantly figuring out what our shared values are, and it's a moving target. And the body of law itself is a complex beast with its own surprising dynamics. It's part of an ecosystem. You can't wave away its complexity with such a simplistic ideal.

A given law may be 'bad' (regrettable, even draconian/immoral) when enforced in certain cases, and yet it may also be unfeasible to change that law to add those cases as exceptions. This is why the law gives judges flexibility on sentencing, for example.

In practice, it really never happens that we make the law more permissive through a deliberative process and then start doing the thing. We relax the law because we found that people didn't really respect it and enforcement was unpopular.

And then we only enforce it on people we don't like and can use it as an excuse and everyone will go "yeah, well, I mean, it is a law, after all. They should have known better. Everyone gets caught eventually."

I’m the author of JSON Formatter [1] with 989,000 users.

I probably get a couple of offers a year for it. Of those that have offered specific sums, they ranged from from $10-20k. I always reject them, because it’s pretty obvious they want to turn it into malware.

I’ve had a couple of cases where I felt they went to some effort to schmooze me first, presenting themselves as having benign intentions, almost like a carefully crafted con. But as far as I can tell, there is no legitimate, ethical reason to want to acquire it, and I won’t sell out my users like that.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-formatter/bcj...

$20k seems like a pretty lowball offer? Close to 1M users (plus potential for further growth) and you have me expecting at least $400k... Or, am I expecting too much?

There isn't potential for further growth if it gets bought. They just want to serve malware to the existing userbase.

That is still $0.02 per user. Not a bad deal.

JSON Formatter is more aimed at technical users. I wonder if an extension with 1M less technical users would next higher.

I feel like the rate is determined by the market and/or the profit model of the buyer.

So a) there are other extension authors with similar coverage who are selling out and/or b) they can't turn a reasonable profit at a higher price.

how do you suggest to make those 400k back in any reasonable amount of time?

Good UX depends on audience and context. Many things are widely shared precisely because they give the user something fun and unexpected.

For people who work with computers all day, being online is more perfunctory, and the pleasure of seeing something fun/different rarely outweighs the annoyance of the interruption or of having to figure out an unconventional UI. But that's not everyone.