[fredrikholm]

> An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

I refer to this as the Notion-to-Confluence cost border.

When Notion first came out, it was snappy and easy to use. Creating a page being essentially free of effort, you very quickly had thousands of them, mostly useless.

Confluence, at least in west EU, is offensively slow. The thought of adding a page is sufficiently demoralizing that it's easier to update an existing page and save yourself minutes of request time outs. Consequently, there's some ~20 pages even in large companies.

I'm not saying that sleep(15 * SECOND) is the way to counter, but once something becomes very easy to do at scale, it explodes to the point where the original utility is now lost in a sea of noise.

[teekert]

It’s strange how sensitive humans are to these sort of relative perceived efforts. Having a charged, cordless vacuum cleaner ready to go and take around the house has also changed our vacuuming game. Because carrying a big unwieldy vacuum cleaner and needing to find a power socket at every location just feels like much more effort. Even though it really isn't.

[TeMPOraL]

It is. The classical vacuum is heavier, you have to find the socket and plug it in (non-trivial if you have few of them, or have kids and sockets have kid blocks on them), and perhaps most importantly, you need two free hands to operate it (particularly when carrying, plugging in and repositioning). That alone is enough to turn it into a primary activity, i.e. the kind of thing that you explicitly decide to do and becomes your main focus. Meanwhile, a charged cordless cleaner is something you can semi-consciously grab with one hand while passing by, and use on the go to do some cleaning while actually focused on something else. It's an entirely different class of activity, much easier to fit in during the day.

Ironically, the cordless vacuum is even better than vacuum robots in this regard! I was surprised to hear from some friends and acquaintances that they prefer the manual vacuum to robotic one, and find it a better time/effort saver - but I eventually realized they're right, simply because the apps for controling the robotic vacuums are all steaming piles of shit, and their bad UI alone turns activating the robot into primary activity. It may be a brief activity, but it still requires full focus.

[TeMPOraL]

The term I know / used for this is "trivial inconveniences", via an old article of Scott Alexander[0].

The quote from example from early in the article stuck with me for years:

Think about this for a second. The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website.

(Now this is more poetic, but I suppose the much more insightful example that also stuck with me is given later - companies enticing you to buy by offering free money, knowing well that most customers can't be arsed to fill out a form to actually get that money.)

--

[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...

[capitainenemo]

I suspect that applies specifically to their cloud rewrite which was apparently a bloat of JS libs and hundreds of requests even by Atlassian standards. The on-prem self-host Confluence I've used is still pretty snappy and pleasant to use and without throwing an absurd amount of resources at it. We do have quite a lot of actually-useful documentation in it.

That said, Atlassian is busy relentlessly raising the price for self-host to push people into their cloud roach motel, so we'll probably be on some alternative (either FOSS or commercial, but self-host) soon too.

[arionmiles]

I find this to be a very amusing critique. In my experience, Notion (when I stopped using it 3 years ago) was slow as molasses. Slow to load, slow to update. In comparison, at work, I almost exclusively favor Confluence Cloud. It's very responsive for me.

We have tons of Confluence wikis, updated frequently.

[zvqcMMV6Zcr]

I think it might be the same issue as with WordPress and Jira - terrible plugins. Each company uses own special mix, and encounters issues often occurring in that one specific configuration. And it is the base platform that takes the blame.

[jraph]

> Consequently, there's some ~20 pages even in large companies.

As someone working on Confluence to XWiki migration tools, I wish this was remotely true, my life would be way easier (and probably more boring :-)).

[capitainenemo]

Interesting. First I've heard of Xwiki - it does look nice, and what with Atlassian's price increases... do you have any migration tips?

[edit] I found https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Conflu... - hopefully that's a good reference.