New policy

I don’t work at Observable but I’ve spoken to several folks there about these issues. So, in the interest of answering your question quickly, here’s my understanding.

No, definitely not. Private notebooks will stay private. Free account holders will lose the ability to edit private notebooks or to create new ones, however.

That’s correct, only paid users will be able to create private notebooks to use keys.

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Thank you @mcmcclur
We created an FAQ and pinned it to the ‘Latest’ and ‘Announcement’ categories in the forum.

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Observable’s raison d’être is to collaborate and share. That’s why I think this strategy is a really bad news for the community. There are several reasons for this.

A creative process is always built in several phases. First, we think. Then we test things. And finally we produce. I’m not sure if these 3 phases should be done in a public way. In any case, forcing people to test things publicly under the eyes of the community is rather likely to prevent creation.

Second, it will discourage beginners. Indeed, it is not easy to write your first lines of code knowing that what you do can be seen by everyone. I would never have started working on Observable if I had to do it publicly. Today, I spend my time convincing colleagues to come and work with me on Observable. But if I explain to them that what they are going to do will be public from the start, they won’t come. No doubt about it.

Finally, the fact that everything is public will be very annoying to see the new interesting productions. Every day, I look at the recent notebooks. If most of these new notebooks are tests or work in progress, it won’t be interesting at all. The interesting stuff will be drowned out.

Proposals:

  • Restoring private (or unlisted) notebooks for free users

If no:

  • Restoring private (or unlisted) notebooks for free users in a limited number (5/user)
  • Separate very clearly the drafts notebooks and the public notebooks. Adda a banner “work in progress” for draft notebooks. Exclude them from the list of “recent notebooks” and “trendings”. Have the possibility to change status.
  • Why not add a button [I wish to collaborate / I work alone for the moment] to respect the different phases of the creation. If you check “I work alone for the moment”, the notebook should not be visible to others. If you check “I wish to collaborate”, the notebook could be visible on a new section on the website.

Conclusion

The choice that has just been made is very bad news. For the sake of the community, it can’t stay the way it is.

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I feel the same way. I’m glad I’m not alone.
If I discovered Observable now, I wouldn’t start using it as much, and I wouldn’t grow into a pro user.

As a pro user and fan, I’m happy to start paying, but I feel forced to.

And as “Republish” button is gone I’m also forced to relay on the fork feature (which seems undeveloped, unintuitive, awkward, and sometimes broken) in my own notebooks just to make some edits.

I expected the Pro plan would introduce larger limits and early access to new features to shape the future product, but instead my favorite tool in my hands began to morph into a social network.
I’d rather pay to keep it the way it was.

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Not getting into changes for free users, the removal of the “Publish” button on “public (unlisted)” notebooks seems to me like a really bad development for pro users too.

We have a pro team with many “public (unlisted)” notebooks in production, and now it just got much harder to do edits on these notebooks without potentially breaking production. I agree with @oluckyman that the fork feature doesn’t work very well, and to me it generates much more friction when updating public notebooks.

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I raised pretty much this exact issue in this forum post. I hope this issue improves.

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Totally agree with bernardol

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@neocarto, thank you for your thoughtful feedback and suggestions. We take all your feedback seriously and will certainly be monitoring and evaluating what changes we need to make to be true to our raison d’être. Collaboration and working together with data is a very big part of this.

There are certainly trade-offs in the recent changes and our thinking is evolving. We will consider all these suggestions seriously as we evaluate the next set of changes to the platform.

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@oluckyman we will look into the merge bugs. We think we found the reason for that ‘Oops’ error, but if you can remember what sequence of events caused that for you, we will continue investigating.

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I share the many of the concerns that have been expressed in this thread. I definitely hope that the company considers how publishing works in Pro accounts and how all users might want to experiment at least some in a non-public context. I also have to acknowledge being a little disappointed myself when I first heard of the changes. I suppose I was happy with the way it was.

Having said all that, Observable is a company with an awesome product and 40 or so employees living mostly in an area that I’ve heard is not cheap. I think the company is taking reasonable steps to become profitable. Venture capital won’t last forever, after all.

To put it in perspective, another way to make a big old pot of money would be to sell the platform to a large company. How would we like it if Google purchased the platform? I wonder how addictive the Trending Menu would become?

It’s also the case that the company contributes to a ton of open source code. The big one is obviously D3, which itself is used in plenty of other projects. There are others, though, like TopoJSON, Vega, and Vega-lite. I imagine there are quite a few more. Of course, they’ve created new open source tools too, like Plot. I’ve worked for a company in the past that didn’t respect the open source mentality. This ain’t that.


I don’t mean to sound dismissive of some of the concerns brought up here. On the contrary, I think some good points have been made. I just think those points need to be balanced against some other concerns as well.

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Cobus I really hope so. Because the community enjoys open source and produces every day code for free on the platform. To be popular, Observable must not restrict too much the features offered to free users. If people have to pay for private notebooks or other useful things, they will leave. I ask myself the question. And honestly, it’s a shame because your product is really great.

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I think the company is taking reasonable steps to become profitable.

@mcmcclur this makes sense to me, but I think removing the “Publish” button is making workflows worse for the paying customers, which in my mind goes against becoming profitable as a company. It’s like we’re paying for the same thing, but one day we wake up and we simply lost a very important feature.

Maybe this was a necessary byproduct of limiting private notebooks for free users (different discussion), but if yes it is very unfortunate.

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Very unfortunate for free users also.

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We are actively working on how to improve the workflow for editing public notebooks without breaking production. Although the fork and merge should work (bugs aside) as a workaround, we are confident that we will have a better solution soon.

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In any case, the best solution would be obliviously to allow free users to make changes privately.

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Although I am sure the Observable gatekeepers are aware, I want to remind the team how the proposed ‘Pro policy’ directly conflicts with the ‘privacy by default’ mandate enshrined in the GDPR (e.g. customers should be able to “Curb or withdraw any permissions previously given by them”) as well as the data portability clause of the upcomming Digital Markets Act (seeing how previously created notebooks remain locked unless paid for by users who are on a free plan).

Not to mention the quite extortative vendor lock-in by greasing people up with ‘unlimited’ free space while a ‘limit’ should have been advertised from the start. People should be able to reasonably assess and compare platform offerings before comitting to one, e.g. Colab, Starboard, Deepnote, Wolfram Notebook and so on. Again, practices that the upcoming DMA aims to curb for platforms operating within the European Union.

Alternative

Rather than the all or nothing approach currently proposed, why not try a credit based approach:

  1. Users start with X credits to keep private notebooks
  2. Users can gain credits through providing support/forks/suggestions on other people’s notebooks or buying X amount of credits
    • And if we are really devious, award users ‘notebook credits’ when featured on the homepage or when a user’s notebook functions are frequently imported by others (although we may want to introduce mechanisms to prevent a ‘rich get richer’ effect from occurring)
  3. Provide ‘Pro’ subscription plans that refill user credits on a regular basis
  4. For previously signed up users, keep all previously private notebooks editable; many users have been with you from the early days and should not be bereft of their loyalty to your product.
  5. Bring back the (re)publish button, being a staple of many existing workflows.

I am sure more business oriented folk would be able to come up with something more fleshed out, but the above would at least solve some of the ‘all or nothing’ policy change issues people are having by providing some (creative) leeway for new and existing users.

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I agree almost word-for-word with @neocarto . Throwing up barriers to entry for those of us new to the field (for example, that anything you make must be public for future employers to wade through) seems to run directly against the ethos of the collaboration that Observable is trying to emphasize.

There’s a reason GitHub has private repos; there’s a reason many of us abandoned LastPass when they eliminated free features; the list goes on…

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I want to add one more use case that’s being broken by the new policy. I use Observable for teaching data visualization and EDA. The students make forks of a template I provide for their assignments. Of course, I don’t want the assignments to be public as that will allow students to just look up the answers.

I know there are education teams available but that means I have to add all students to an org and I haven’t yet explored how well that workflow works. Maybe it works if there is integration with LMSs like Canvas. Either way, I need to change my workflow from how I’ve been doing assignments so far.

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@domoritz We would highly recommend you try using a Team for teaching with Observable (Pro Teams free for educational use like yours, as you mentioned). The sharing features in Teams, as well as easy access to your assignments etc. works really well and eliminates the need to make notebooks Public (unlisted) and managing all those URLs.

Mike Freeman (when he was teaching at UW) created this wonderful collection describing his teaching process using Observable Teams.

Please reach out to us at sales@observablehq.com to get set up with a team for your students if you want to explore this.

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As academic, I have created a Team for teaching with a single-use coupon sent by Courtney. Cartographie thématique pour les étudiants de master 1 GAED de l'université Paris Cité
I had to give my personal credit card for this. Normally it should be free. But in the billing section, it is written that I will have to pay next month. Please solve this…