In this article
Our About page lists three principles in a couple of sentences each. That's fine for a summary, but each one actually came from a real decision we had to make at some point, so here's the longer version, with the "why" behind each.
Product Philosophy
Every principle we claim is backed by a feature we deliberately chose not to build.
Useful before impressive
Early on, there was a version of this idea that included a dashboard — save your lookups, organize them into folders, tag them, build a little research library inside the site. It would have looked more like a "real product." We killed it, because it meant storing data about what you'd looked up, tied to some kind of account, which is exactly the kind of thing we didn't want to build.
A tool that does one narrow job well, with nothing to remember or manage, beat a more impressive-looking tool that asked more of you in return. We'd rather be the thing you open, use, and close, than the thing you have to maintain.
Privacy by restraint
This principle sounds nice in a sentence, but it actually shaped very specific decisions. No accounts, so there's nothing to log into and nothing tied to your identity across visits. No saved search history, even though it would have been a genuinely convenient feature for people doing repeated research — the convenience wasn't worth the tradeoff of us holding onto a record of what you've looked at.
No follower or following list access, discussed in more detail in a separate post, because that kind of data gets misused too easily. Restraint here means turning down features that would have made the product objectively more capable, because capability isn't the only thing that matters.
Restraint in Practice:
Turning down capabilities that add convenience when they introduce unnecessary data risk for users or creators.
Respect creators
This one shows up less in what the tools do and more in what we've written alongside them. Every caption tool includes a reminder that the words belong to whoever wrote them, and that reading or copying them doesn't transfer any rights.
Our guides on citation and copyright exist because "easy to access" and "okay to repost" are different things, and we didn't want the ease of the tool to blur that line for someone who genuinely didn't think it through. It's a smaller, quieter principle than the other two, but it's the one that shapes the tone of everything we write, not just what we build.
Why we're explaining all this rather than just listing it
Principles on an About page are easy to write and easy to ignore. We'd rather you see the actual tradeoffs behind them, because a principle that never cost you anything isn't really a principle — it's just a nice sentence.
These three have each cost us a feature we could have built. That's the point.
The Principle Test
A principle that never cost anything isn't really a principle. Each of our three principles directly cost us a feature we could have built.
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