A feature that's opt-in will get like 1% of the use of a feature that's opt-out. A happier middle ground would be to enable by default and show a "I don't like this, pls turn it off" button the first few times.
EDIT: shouldn't single out any specific role here. We think opt-out, enable-by-default makes a feature have far greater total utility. But we could do more to provide user agency for these features in-line during first use or find a different balance point.
Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.
-> Your users don't like making things opt-out. Low usage metrics is a UX problem. Activating it without informed consent gives you bloated metrics anyway.
What is so hard about that?
> Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.
Lamest excuse ever.
I wouldn't be surprised if you phoned back home about that mic activation - do you?
I recently joined an org where Notion is in use - I will actively lobby them to not install the desktop app, at all or to quit Notion alltogether.
Good compromise.
Runner up is the "what's new" tutorial overlays.
But none of this conversation makes me want to use Notion. We used to use it at $OLDJOB for meeting notes and light DB work for non-technical users. Now I’m happy we stopped.
Thank god the web browser was developed in an era where PMs weren't stack-ranked on rubrics like "feature engagement". Imagine a world where every website was granted access to your filesystem, webcam, microphone, and geolocation by default so that PMs could report back on how many websites were making use of those browser APIs.
Well... yeah. It's either because the benefits of opting in aren't communicated well enough or that users just don't actually want it.
For AI meeting notes, I'd imagine it's the latter.
Then refuse implementing it. Have some dignity for God's sake.
Also, searching for dignity in a post-“don’t be evil” startup environment seems unusual.
Expecting a shift in corporate culture to come from a short list of individuals making great personal sacrifice (of their careers, reputations, whatever) is not reasonable, sustainable, or realistic.
I know there are a lot of folks who abhor regulation in many contexts, but stuff like this is most effectively handled by such mechanisms.
“Ze engagement metrics must go up on ze dashboard every quarter, jah!” I can’t wait for the day PMs and other parasites find a new industry to move to. They sure have sucked the fun out of this one.
Tell them that alone is one reason I'll never use it. I'm sure I'm a minority, but not zero.
That is an implementation detail. What matters is the outcome:
Notion leadership has signed off on this being opt-out.
The calculus here, as you indicated, was that opt-in has little buy-in.
What leadership didn't take into account was the risk of this being publicized, and the blowback from this awareness.
That, or leadership has already calculated that not enough people will care (possibly true).
I suppose it's then up to those that do care to make more noise about this, to tilt the odds?, so this specific calculus (also known as enshittification) doesn't keep occuring (i.e, if the blowback costs are disproportionate to the value provided by default opt-out....)
Whenever people on HN and else where present you the mustache twirling evil Microsoft or Apple or Google C-suite/board who are trying to enshitificate a product or a tool because they don’t care, always keep in mind that the reality is often a lot more mundane than that.
The application that is “sneakily” listening to you and transmitting everything you say to their servers can be a legitimate product of a mustache twirling villain, but it’s a lot more likely (in my experience) that a group of 5 engineers and a PM were tasked by “Present relevant products from our company to the user” task and someone was like “what if we record what they are saying (or just zip-up their entire ~/Documents folder), run it through an LLM on our server and prompt it to analyze their convo or documents and recommend one of our products to sell to them? Sounds good to me, no?”
