Product11 Jun 20264 min read
Comments are conversation. Approval is a decision.
If every note blocked publishing, raising a small thing would cost the same as raising a large one.
The first version of review had one state. A clip with an open comment could not be scheduled. It was tidy, it was easy to explain, and within a week the people using it had stopped leaving comments.
The reason is obvious in hindsight. If a note blocks publishing then “the caption is a bit tight on line two” costs exactly as much to say as “this number is from last quarter”. So people stop saying the first one, and the small improvements stop happening.
Two things, kept apart
A comment is a question about a moment. It never blocks anything. An approval is a decision about whether this goes out, and it is the only thing that gates — and only in a workspace that has asked for it.
An approval the publish button ignores is decoration. One it always checks is a gate imposed on the person with nobody to ask.
The state that makes it real is the third one: approved, and then edited. An approval that predates the last edit approved something else, and saying so is the difference between a review step and a badge.