Notion's mid-life crisis

213 pointsposted a year ago
by krishna2
(jjinux.com)

162 Comments

Aurornis

a year ago

I enjoyed Notion at first for certain tasks, but it became much less enjoyable as everyone tried to force everything into emoji-laden Notion docs. The Notion spaces used by the Product and Program managers I worked with in the past few years have become a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date, hard to find, and often superseded by some new Notion page they created but forgot to tell us about until we had spent weeks following the old one.

In a way, Notion has come to occupy the same space as Jira for me: A tool that tries to be everything to everyone and gets abused by people who feel like using as many features as possible is a best practice.

I’ve had better success lately asking people to step outside of Notion and instead work in an old-fashioned shared Google doc. It’s amazing how much more productive we can all be when the tools are simplified to exactly what we need and people don’t feel like they need to sprinkle emojis and checklists and other features into everything just because they can.

dgunay

a year ago

I don't get why Notion is so popular either, but your complaints about it seem like a skill issue on the part of your managers. I see this a lot too, but in my experience it happens no matter the medium - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, etc. People who don't obsess over keeping it organized eventually spaghetti their documentation all over the place. I wouldn't expect the kinds of people who need to be convinced of the worth of refactoring and getting rid of old code to also understand that out of date documentation needs to be updated or it is often more harmful than just deleting it.

more_corn

a year ago

Try writing documentation in confluence and you’ll get why Notion is preferable. Also go try to find something you wrote in confluence six months ago.

redsparrow

a year ago

> a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date

I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.

A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.

Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...

Majestic121

a year ago

It's a base feature of notion, exactly as you describe it : a freshness stamp and notifications to recheck every 7/30/90/custom days

hnthrowaway121

a year ago

> but forgot to tell us about until we had spent weeks following the old one.

To be fair that’s not on Notion per se, there’s an underlying communication problem (which it sounds like your google doc solves!).

1123581321

a year ago

Emoji overuse aside, you are describing the challenge of maintaining a team wiki, regardless of software. Google Docs is taking people out of the wiki mindset, I suspect.

I agree there are issues any time the bored folks in “product” are allowed to set up, well, anything, honestly.

threeseed

a year ago

> A tool that tries to be everything to everyone

Jira doesn't try to be everything. It's a project management app. It does nothing else.

Notion is wiki, CRM, project management, calendar etc.

Supermancho

a year ago

> It's a project management app. It does nothing else.

I would say it doesn't do that very well. You can't manage projects without mapping out dependencies, visually and with integrated relationship tracking. JIRA is miserable at this.

LizPoggi

a year ago

Notion databases easily allow dependencies, integrated relationship tracking and multiple ways to visualize a project roadmap. Can't speak to JIRA but Notion is continuously releasing new updates that respond to user needs. There is a major downside to this of course. As a solopreneur I find it frustrating that Notion's updates tend to serve corporate needs, but it's a good business strategy and allows Notion to continue to serve others with its free version.

paulddraper

a year ago

It's an issue tracker, with some project management/agile bolted on

dartos

a year ago

people also use jira as a support ticket system. Sprint planning system. Kanban system. I’ve seen it set up so that it can track work across kanban teams and scrum teams.

Jira has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub.

It can manage your CI pipelines as well.

Jira is an anything app with a bend towards project management. Setting up jira workflows is a whole career.

Source: I worked at Atlassian for 5 years and they use jira as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into jira.

refulgentis

a year ago

people also use email as a support ticket system. Sprint planning system. Kanban system. I’ve seen it set up so that it can track work across kanban teams and scrum teams.

Email has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub.

Email can manage your CI pipelines as well.

Email is an anything app with a bend towards project management. Setting up email workflows is a whole career.

Source: I worked at Google for years and they use email as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into email

dartos

a year ago

…okay?

I mean email isn’t an app, it’s a handful of protocols, but… sure

threeseed

a year ago

a) Support tickets, sprint planning, kanban etc are all part of project management.

b) It can't manage your pipelines. It can visualise deployments and link them to work but you still need some sort of CI/CD tool like Bitbucket, Github etc.

c) It is not an anything app. I can't use it as a wiki, CRM, database, calendar etc.

dartos

a year ago

A) yes

B) it can manage pipelines through those services. Each card change would kick off pipelines whose status updates would cause jira to further change cards potentially kicking off more ci/cd steps.

C) you absolutely can use it as a database, calendar, and a wiki.

It has an api and can store data. You can query cards by label, search by content, and extract structured information from them.

Nested and linked cards provide the tools needed to build wikis.

I’m not 100% sure what the difference between CRMs and support ticketing system are, but Jira instances have been used as support ticketing systems in order to give devs view into what customers want.

It’s not the best at any of those things, but those are all doable (and are being done) with jira.

llamaLord

a year ago

Yeah but saying Jira is like Notion makes fundamentally no sense when Confluence is sitting like... Right there...

ethbr1

a year ago

Sssh. You'll remind the Jira feature team that Confluence exists!

dartos

a year ago

Yeah… that’s Atlassian for you. Why sell just Jira when you can sell jira, confluence, bitbucket, opsgenie, and atlas as part of the Atlassian cloud platform.

This is the company that (already having owned jira) bought trello and did nothing with it for 5 years.

llamaLord

a year ago

Hey!!! We let you put a picture of your cat as the background for your board...

015a

a year ago

Its kind of funny that you'd list four features of notion, three of which people absolutely do regularly and normally use Jira for (e.g. https://support.atlassian.com/jira-work-management/docs/use-...).

The 4th, a Wiki, is of course more-so just Confluence, but I have seen echoes of a wiki make their way into Jira; e.g. in one place I worked, every release was a ticket that was duplicated from a previous ticket, and that ticket had step-by-step instructions on how to run different parts of the release.

You're just wrong on this, bro. Notion tries to be everything to everyone. Jira is everything to everyone, it doesn't matter what it tries to be.

threeseed

a year ago

It's amazing how people think Project Management = Issues (and only issues).

Release Management is a fundamental part of IT Project Management. So of course companies use Jira to track releases. And of course you can tie milestones and OKRs to releases. And of course tickets can have small amounts of text content associated with them. How else would you describe the ticket without them ?

But the idea of Jira being remotely like a Confluence style wiki is just ridiculous.

And your comment is out of some parallel universe where Jira is Confluence.

015a

a year ago

You must of missed the multiple points where I said "three out of four" and "echoes" of a wiki; but reading comprehension is hard, don't worry you'll get 'em next time.

btown

a year ago

I've often thought that, looking historically, Notion only exists because product innovation in Google Docs is decoupled from revenue growth for Google Workspace. Putting a draggable handle, at the user's election, alongside every paragraph in Docs, and adding a customizable shortcut for search across docs, would go a long way towards Docs being 90% of what Notion's value proposition was as of a few years ago. But most startups using Notion already had Google Workspace for email anyways, so there was no growth story there for Google to invest in this mandate.

Now, Notion's done a lot since then. If you want a knowledge base that can also have semi-structured tabular data, and portability in that data, it's hard to beat. Notion AI, pulling from disparate sources with the context of the current planning document, is really neat, too! But not every company will want to pay the per-head cost for this, unless it can replace other existing tools.

And when it comes to spaces like CRM in that context, looking at https://www.google.com/search?q=notion+crm&udm=14 ... there's a lot that could be said about Notion's (lack of) SEO/advertising there, but more concretely, a CRM solution nowadays has to bring a wealth of integrations as a near-prerequisite, and Notion doesn't have a mature story there - nor can they easily, because different customers will have different data models that make it hard to have a standardized notion of "what fields can I count on to be present for an Account."

Notion is a really powerful system. If it didn't already have a $10B valuation, it would be in tremendously good shape. But it has a long way to go to find the areas of growth it needs to grow beyond $10B.

replwoacause

a year ago

It’s just too bad Notion AI can’t see data stored in databases, which is arguably Notions biggest value add and differentiator. So given that it can’t use that data with AI queries really limits the usefulness of it.

PaulHoule

a year ago

Right now tabular data is where LLMs go to die but that's an active research area.

euroderf

a year ago

I don't see why Notion-adjacent apps don't just deeply integrate SQLite for everything table-related. What am i missing ?

apsurd

a year ago

Another anecdote added to the "I don't get notion" pile.

I just don't get notion. I use Apple Notes for everything id use notion for + scratch.txt on every project folder root. (i've used notion, quip, gdocs, dropbox paper)

Notion lives rent free in my mind because while im indifferent to it, people seem to LOVE it. and that's so fascinating.

even this article, I upvoted it because the conversation about notion is interesting, the article itself is a dud after reading it.

we live in a world where Notion is a multi billion dollar company and i have no idea why—now that's interesting!

BadHumans

a year ago

Notion is popular because it is infinitely customizable. Want to draw in your Notion database? Done. Want to do Kanban? Easy. Gantt Charts? Child's play. Whatever you want Notion to do it likely can be and it is available on any device you want and you can share it with your team so working with other people is not a pain in the ass like it is with most plain text note taking.

dboreham

a year ago

Speaking as someone who tried quite hard to make it do the thing I wanted, not sure that's true.

pants2

a year ago

Just don't try to center text on the page!

JojoFatsani

a year ago

God I hate notion. The way it splits columns until you have like two horizontal inches to type in, the rubber-band linking of documents, just the total lack of opinionation outside of templates..

I might be strange but I just really vibed with Confluence and I’d be happy with it if people would commit to it.

apsurd

a year ago

lol you reminded me when i very first onboarded to notion i kept trying to write something and the magic paragraph thing kept popping up and im like WTF can i just… i'm trying to… wtf… and i wanted to try to use it, so i looked up the magic and i kept trying to magic and it just went zero to a million i guess in my understanding. no idea how to get collapsible sections.

I felt very dumb. Like i just want to write this thing and it wants me to be more magical about what i'm trying to write and fuck it's just text, get the fuck out of my way.

i think it's just there are notion users and then there's everyone else. I recovered in my self love again. I use txt files in my ancient sublime editor :)

iforgotmysocks

a year ago

Apple Notes is underrated. There is no flashy features to distract you. Just you and your notes.

luckman212

a year ago

I strongly disagree for these reasons:

- note data stored in a proprietary format

- no way to access note data from other apps/api

- no way to export in bulk, or in any other format than PDF (a terrible format for notes)

- iCloud sync is a mildly terrifying thing to entrust important data to

I use Apple Notes for the occasional quick grocery list but that's about it.

015a

a year ago

I don't get the "note data is stored in a proprietary format" hate. There's a dozen different open source tools you can find which will one-shot export your Apple Notes to markdown, when you want to leave the ecosystem. Its not like Notion where the exports are messy, non-bulk, and destructive; they're proprietary, but parseable and sitting in a file on your MacOS filesystem.

I've never had iCloud Sync display any weird behavior in Apple Notes, and I've got thousands in there. I have, absolutely, seen Obsidian Sync delete notes I did not delete, and fail to upload notes; both of these were generally remediable via their recycle bin, but still very concerning.

All of these complaints are of the nature of "I don't actually have anything valuable to write down so I'd rather worry about the nature of the tool than what I'm writing". And, to be clear, I think this is why Notion is so popular, just for different reasons than your's; it looks great, and makes you feel productive because you've got amazing cross-referenced tables and hyperbacklinks and h1h2h3s and then wait where's the content?

vunderba

a year ago

Counterpoint, I have seen sync issues on very popular large note, cloud-based solutions that use proprietary formats - Evernote comes to mind.

When you have tens of thousands of notes, it's hard to even know if at some point, the note has been suddenly changed, reverted, or modified in a way that you didn't even realize occurred.

With an open format, specifically a text based one like Markdown, I can sync all my notes to a git repository in a diffable manner that I can quickly review.

threeseed

a year ago

Notes data is stored in an open SQLite3 database as Protocol Buffer data:

sqlite3 "~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite"

This is because it needs to support CRDT style syncing.

But the schemas have been decoded so you can access it using pretty much any language.

LizPoggi

a year ago

Agee with you! I use a shortcut to send voice notes directly into Notion. I only use apple notes when I'm in a location I can't speak, and move them to Notion the next time I'm on my mac.

jazzyjackson

a year ago

If you sync your notes to icloud you can bulk export to flat text files via https://privacy.apple.com/ > "request a copy of your data"

I've never experienced data loss due to icloud sync YMMV

apsurd

a year ago

Great points i also agree with. That's Apple being Apple. I'd want an open format for sure.

Thing about Apple Notes is in spite of the open ideals, if you're in the apple ecosystem, it's just easily there, on all devices, very unassuming and simply, and that's so so very valuable.

It's the long view that gets me. Over the last 20 years, if i'm in the Apple ecosystem, notes are there, synced across everything, and it's just text. and it's simple.

jen729w

a year ago

#tag support across shared Notes is also abysmal. The new tag doesn’t appear as an actual tag in person 2’s system until they ‘initiate’ it.

I tried really hard to love Notes. I wanted to. For the reasons you note, and this one, and many others, I couldn’t.

pbh101

a year ago

Agree on all the above except that iCloud sync seems to have been rock-solid for years now.

antifa

a year ago

iCloud notes really needs a markdown mode or a non-WYSIWYG mode.

easeout

a year ago

You say that, but there are tons of features in Notes. They're just successfully kept out of your way until you go looking for them, so when you just want a note that's what you get. This is progressive disclosure, a longtime tenet of Apple GUI design.

A relevant and somewhat meta example: This year they added disclosable sections, which were previously a differentiator for Notion. That's in addition to handwriting selection and editing, voice memos, collaborative editing… Not to mention it's still a regular app and you can have as many note windows as you want.

DavidPiper

a year ago

I'm in the process of moving all (~2000) of my Apple Notes to Logseq. I still think Apple Notes is excellent, and I'll still be using it for Inbox-style notes.

But it just needs to be a bit more open and extendable. Give me good tables, proper linking between notes and a graph view (or at least an API so I can build that myself) and I'll be back forever.

atombender

a year ago

I like Apple Notes, but collaborative editing is completely broken. I use it for sharing things like shopping lists with my wife. If I edit something while she's also editing, it gets mangled. Whatever Notes uses for collaborative syncing, it's not OT or CRDTs.

Notes is also quite terrible at many things:

* Embedded photos cannot be resized or placed next to text

* Table support is incredibly limited, to the point of being unusable except as a rudimentary grid

* No support for multiple columns

* No table of contents view

* No linking between notes (I think?)

* No way to change the font or change out the dreary yellow background colour

* No syntax highlighting of embedded code fragment

* No support for equations

* No support for shorthands (e.g. # to get a level 1 headline)

Notion, for all its flaws, has all of the above. And its collaborative editing is solid, if maybe not as good as Google Docs.

two_cents

a year ago

Apple Notes is pretty close to perfect for me - it's just missing Markdown support and backlinks. I did just figure out how to link notes together with the '>>' shortcut, which is a game-changer. I've tried a bunch of other apps, but I always come back to Notes.

jaynate

a year ago

Totally agree. Use it for everything. Even replaced my handwritten notebooks since I got new iPad Pro w pencil.

ilrwbwrkhv

a year ago

Humans naturally love to twiddle knobs and move things around. Notion attaches that behavior with money making through an affiliate program. Result is a billion dollar company.

tucnak

a year ago

thia is the best assay i read on notion ever

rchaud

a year ago

Notion is popular with college/university students, which is why there are a billion "Notion Template" videos online. Many have productized their templates and turned them into something to sell -- sort of like selling notebooks with Cornell note-taking method pattern built in, back in the old days.

I see it at similar to Figma in the sense that both tools are cloud-based and free, and their users love yapping about it.

user

a year ago

[deleted]

richardlblair

a year ago

I was thinking about a super simple app I wanted to whip together today... Then I realized I can just do what I want in Notion with almost 0 effort.

curious-tech-12

a year ago

cant agree more, I initially used to think I am using it wrong but seriously I cant get notion.

epiccoleman

a year ago

I like Notion but I share the sense that it's not really targeted at my use case anymore. I think I could essentially move everything into Obsidian and lose almost nothing in the process.

I just use it for taking notes and writing stuff down. I like how easy it is to drop an image, video, or document into a notion page, but I've only barely used features like databases which seem to be the big selling point, and none of my usage of those is really anything that couldn't just be a plaintext table in a markdown doc.

One of these days I'll get up the gumption to crawl through, excise what's worth keeping into Obsidian , and cancel my subscription. But not today, lol.

diego_sandoval

a year ago

I started as an Obsidian user, and generally I like the fact that it's just Markdown, but markdown tables really suck, to the point that I simply ended up avoiding them at all costs, and I used OnlyOffice's Excel equivalent in parallel to Obsidian for a while.

But Notion has good tables by default, so I can have both good tables (and tableviews) and normal text files in the same app.

I could have tried Obsidian plugins, but I suspect that it would have been a time sink, and Notion offered everything in a neat package, so in the end, it won.

strken

a year ago

I would find markdown tables easier to use if they were just CSV and some delimiters for start/header/end. Imagine being able to write

    +------------------------------+
    Product,Cost per seat,Importance
    +------------------------------+
    GSuite,$7.20,Critical
    Notion,$10,High
    "Something, ""with"", commas and double-quotes",$5,Low
    +------------------------------+

vunderba

a year ago

I think that's fair.

I will say that Obsidian's tables have gotten a lot better in terms of reflow, sorting, etc. At some point Obsidian might add some additional config to their tables to allow users to manually control column widths, etc., but it would have to be non-standard markdown - like how you can scale down images by adding a width parameter.

    ![[./media/example_image.png|Custom caption|450]]

abhinavk

a year ago

Obsidian needs to officially embed SQLite.

base698

a year ago

I just migrated everything out of Notion into Ibsidian. Notion was unusable after more than a few hundred items in a DB. I migrated to using dataview and lists in Obsidian and haven't had a problem since. And it works offline.

I use it for my workout logbook and cooking/recipe log with hundreds of entries.

LizPoggi

a year ago

Agreed. Not useful for large dataset. The magic is in connecting databases - relating project management to notes etc. I've resorted to duplicating each database and archiving anything that is worth keeping. That way databases I use operationally retain speed.

remram

a year ago

I find DataView to be clunky as well. Data entry is not easy (I'm currently using "DB Folder" and it helps but it's quirky) and each-row-is-a-file does not give great performance.

TheDong

a year ago

notion doesn't have normal text files.

You can click "export to markdown" on a notion page, you can click "import from markdown", but those two markdown dialects are totally incompatible. Most of the time notion can't even read what it exported.

The notion web editor for me has very noticeable lag, so I really want to just be able to write some text somewhere to represent a notion table or whatever, but there's simply no supported way to do that I'm aware of.

I mean, it's fine, using a i7 core at 100% at all times just to produce text at a 2 second delay is totally fine for a text editor, I'm sure notion's doing its best.

abhinavk

a year ago

Yes. I use Notion (or Logseq or any other Electron-based note-taking apps) as a filing cabinet. I cannot type in it. The typing latency is too much.

hackernewds

a year ago

I'm very curious how and why to use Obsidian well. It's so confusing I've given up multiple times.

muppetman

a year ago

Don't buy into all the crazy around it. It's a Markdown editor with some organisation features. If you read Reddit, people treat it like some sort of second coming, making sure EVERY NOTE THEY TAKE is linked at least one other, tagged, etc. Like somehow that makes notes better. I was confused at first too but once I realised most of these people are insane and it's a note taking app, it's very easy simple and quick to use. I love it.

theshackleford

a year ago

> Like somehow that makes notes better.

And for many, it does. It may not for you, but everyone has their own system.

crooked-v

a year ago

It's just ("just" in the good sense) a fancy Markdown editor with a bunch of plugins, including for most of the core features (which are just bundled-in plugins and can be turned off).

vunderba

a year ago

It's a pretty simple note organizer for markdown notes. That's literally it. Vaults/folders/subfolders are 1:1 representations of the folders on your physical computer.

It's WYSIWYG, so even if you don't know markdown, you can just use standard shortcuts like Ctrl-B to bold something, Ctrl-I to italicize, etc.

But it's only as valuable as the notes that it contains. If you are a fastidious note taker (for your projects, work, etc), like to ontologically tag things, and appreciate building inter-related knowledge (like wikipedia links), then you'd be hard pressed to find a better substitute even compared to other heavy hitters like Joplin and Logseq.

cityzen

a year ago

At its simplest, it is a UI to markdown files. When I was first looking into it, it seemed very tightly coupled with the zettelkasten method which I know nothing about. At first I thought that I was missing something but have since used it as just a markdown note app.

I will asked ChatGPT to output responses in a note form in markdown so I can copy/paste it in.

You can wrap code with: ‘’’elixir Code here ‘’’ To get syntax highlighting

Todo lists are as simple as -[ ] to do item

You can use iCloud/dropbox to sync.

tomjakubowski

a year ago

Think of it like maintaining your own personal Wiki, comprised of flat-file markdown

charlie0

a year ago

So far, the only weakness I've found with Obsidian are the tables. Someone needs to build in a killer tables feature. Obsidian is an Electron app; it shouldn't be too hard to build a stripped down version of Google Sheets.

crooked-v

a year ago

Check out the Advanced Tables plugin - https://github.com/tgrosinger/advanced-tables-obsidian

maleldil

a year ago

Unfortunately, it's nowhere close to Notion tables or spreadsheets in general. Formulas are very primitive (eg aggregation is either sum or mean), the syntax is confusing, and you have to manually re-evaluate them. Tables are Obsidian's main weakness to me.

refulgentis

a year ago

> it shouldn't be too hard to build a stripped down version of Google Sheets.

HN, never change.

lovethevoid

a year ago

For basic notes, the ones that come with most devices imo are very good. Apple notes, Samsung notes, Onenote, all very good. So good I find it difficult to recommend anything else to people, like Notion still doesn’t even have proper pen/stylus support. Obsidian to me fits a good niche of being extensible with plugins but I get why some people can’t get into it.

Notion shines with database use, and was how I used to write my blogs and connecting the API directly to my site to auto update. I’m surprised you’re a paying customer and barely use the database stuff!

dottjt

a year ago

I think once I started using databases it made other note-taking tools seem primitive in comparison. It's hard to explain why, but it just allows you to organise and categorise hundreds of notes seamlessly.

I also really like how it treats everything as blocks, that's another thing that I can no longer live without.

If you're not interested in features like this, then yeah. Obsidian would be a good use-case.

karakanb

a year ago

It still blows my mind that Google Docs still haven't taken over Notion's business altogether. I have used Notion for ~6 months for my own company, ended up going back to Google Docs because it was not worth it. I am sure there are a billion other uses of it, we weren't using any of its database-like features, just as an internal documentation platform, but still fascinating to see a business thrive on the lack of innovation of a giant.

In practice, Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users. I guess they don't have a financial incentive to make docs better, but I would gladly pay extra to have everything there.

I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.

lmm

a year ago

> Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users.

Technically they can. Organisationally they can't.

> I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.

You won't though, or at best you'll make a rough-and-ready version that works for you. Polished stuff doesn't get created without a business model, and you can't make a business model out of a browser extension that messes with a third-party site, not these days anyway.

nunez

a year ago

I am not a huge fan of Notion either, but documentation organization is a huge strength of the tool. Google Docs is too heavy by comparison. Additionally, Notions database capabilities cannot be ignored. You can easily make Notion a task tracker that lives with your documentation. Huge.

mvkel

a year ago

All of the GSuite was an acquisition, so it's kind of amazing that it has been maintained, let alone continues to exist, at all

tucnak

a year ago

All of Google is acquisitions

danpalmer

a year ago

This is a fun piece of creative writing, but I’m not quite sure of the point it’s trying to make about Notion. Is it that Notion is no longer cool? That might be true but isn’t the most insightful comment. Is it about Notion the company languishing in some way?

staplers

a year ago

I used to use Notion daily. I switched to Anytype when Notion launched an AI tool that trains on your data.

A bit more of a learning curve but that's an absolute no-go when a tool contains the inner workings of my brain. Plenty of comparable private options.

Intellectual capital is rapidly being migrated from workers to shareholders under the guise of "AI".

Imagine a world where C-suites no longer rely on or support creative minds.

EDIT: They may say they don't train on user data currently but there's nothing stopping them in the future, especially if they are moving upmarket.

jitl

a year ago

(I work at Notion but not on AI)

There’s far more for Notion to lose “training customer data on AI” than for Notion to gain. Like if an AI feature ever disclosed private information of one customer to another, that would be a huge blow to the company.

The closest thing to that that makes sense for us is building “learn to rank” style search models to improve search results, but this is not usually considered “AI” and is typical for any product trying to make search good.

n_ary

a year ago

For me, it seems that most of the notion users in my circle(very small one) are non-technical people. Even if your AI vomits some other user’s private data, it’ll be considered a glitch and will be forgiven because non-technical users does not panic or gets flame-baited because these are irrelevant to them.

That being said, I appreciate that you understand the risk, and want to believe that the people on the helm of the AI feature and people on the leadership also share your opinion.

jitl

a year ago

On the contrary if Notion were to regurgitate one company’s business development strategy notes to another company, that would be much worse than a technical documentation leak! In my experience non-technical data usually much more important to users than technical data, non-technical users are much less understanding, and our community keeps very close eye out for bugs, leaks, changes in privacy policy, etc.

theshackleford

a year ago

> it seems that most of the notion users in my circle(very small one) are non-technical people.

All the users in my circle are the opposite, they are all technical individuals. Largely developers for whatever reason.

staplers

a year ago

I appreciate the response but once you get investors and shareholders those concerns are worthless.

If it's possible, it will eventually happen.

nunez

a year ago

You can turn Notion AI off in your tenant. It takes a few days, but support will do it. It's annoying that we have to ask instead of toggling a switch, but there you go.

dcre

a year ago

Thanks for the Anytype rec. I have similarly been looking for a good alternative since they turned on AI features you can’t easily opt out of. And I’m not some anti-LLM zealot — I use them every day.

I’m not even worried about them training on user data. The more immediate problem is that if you accidentally type something in the Ask AI box (which is very easy to do because it looks like search), the page you’re on and god know what else is sent to god knows where. When I use LLMs, I like to know which one I’m using and exactly what I’m sending them.

I felt their AI integration was very cavalier and it completely changed my opinion of them as a company. On top of that, the YouTube and Tik Tok productivity grifters thrive on the ecosystem of template BS that Notion seems very happy to encourage. I guess they can’t help it but it is not my vibe. I also want something more stripped down and programmable. Obviously a programmer is not a typical consumer.

jitl

a year ago

(I work at Notion but not on AI)

We maintain a list of data su processors here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Notion-s-List-of-Subprocessors-...

It’s not as specific as citing the actual model version in use from each vendor, though.

light_hue_1

a year ago

That isn't reassuring at all. It's pretty much the worst case scenario. I don't want my private notes sent to places like openai who will use them to train models and who don't have any reasonable corporate governance. They have leaked customer data before.

And I'm not anti AI. I'm an ML researcher who uses LLMs all the time. But there's a big difference between that and revealing all my private information to them.

dcre

a year ago

In their defense, in my phrasing, what is sent and to whom had equal weight. But you’re exactly right: obviously it is OpenAI and Anthropic. The private content being sent is the important part.

Multicomp

a year ago

Notion is jumping the shark by moving from being a notes organization / mini database product to trying to compete with Salesforce and Hubspot. Just completely a different sector / product.

anonygler

a year ago

This is an issue for all the low/no code tools. Every meaningful problem has a first class SaaS product that solves it well.

Notion/Retool/Airtable/Coda/Etc are fighting over a cursed long tail and their employees are slowly going insane trying to generalize asymptotic industries. The “AI” rebranding has no doubt made them want to put a gun in their mouths.

arduinomancer

a year ago

I feel like that’s unavoidable because once you get big company clients your PMs start prioritizing their feature requests

And those companies will inevitably want it to do everything

nunez

a year ago

I can see it.

I've been doing the sales engineer thing for a few years now. Salesforce management is a big part of my job, as this is what the salespeople use to track opportunities and deals.

The data that goes into SFDC is a big part of what gets reported on in sales/revenue forecasts, so it existing is extremely important and is a big reason why Marc Benioff has, like, a billion yachts.

At its core, SFDC is nothing more than a database and a shitload of plugins that enter stuff into that database.

Notion can, theoretically, do this as well.

Given how large the TAM is for revenue management software and how much Marc pays to acquire anything in his space, Notion chasing that market makes a lot of sense.

muzani

a year ago

Often this happens when companies raising more funds when there are no funds available for that sector. Suddenly it's not cool to be a car rental company, they also need to become a logistics platform or bank.

PaulHoule

a year ago

I imported a friend of mine's Notion into Fraxinus, some software I wrote that is a bookmark manager and a webcrawler and an image sorter and a search engine and annotation system and a visualization tool and is likely to get merged with my YOShInOn RSS reader and model trainer (might eat all my side projects that aren't about images and VR.) It's a tool for understanding, organizing and harvesting a collection of documents (so I got some insight into how he uses Notion.)

In his case, he uses it as a CRM for prospecting and it really isn't that bad at the business development end where you don't have a lot of people doing a structured process. But if you could somehow add some structure to notion, in the UI or with some AI interpretation of the text, or both, I could see Notion becoming a CRM or something else, think of something like a spreadsheet for notes.

Of course it might not be Notion that does it, it might be a startup that does it, it might be an established company. Saleforce is a good comparable because you can customize Salesforce to build many kinds of application but you still need programmers to do it. Is somebody in 2024 going to build a system which is as flexible, maybe even more flexible, but doesn't need the programmer?

sanex

a year ago

It's middle aged and not exciting anymore? Doesn't know what else to do so it buys a sports car (adds AI). Just guessing but I know I am much less excited about notion than I was 4 years ago and maybe that's the point or maybe that's just how it resonated with me.

skissane

a year ago

I use Notion because I have to, not because I like it.

Other teams still use Confluence. People said Notion is a lot better than Confluence. Well, I agree I'd rather use it over Confluence, but that's a very low bar for comparison.

For ages they didn't have a find-and-replace feature. I just checked, it looks like they've finally added it in the last few months, but this is the first I notice.

They claim you can export stuff as markdown, but if I export as markdown, edit and reimport, I lose half of the formatting – even basic formatting which is part of the markdown spec.

Their native format (which their API exposes) is a bunch of extremely complex JSON blobs. I thought about writing a tool to let me download stuff, edit it in a sane text editor, then reupload it, but when I saw the complexity I just gave up.

jitl

a year ago

(I work at Notion)

Our public API format is not the "native" format used by the Notion editor. The overly-nested format we designed the public API is aimed at supporting statically typed programming languages like Java or Golang that do not have (tagged) union types natively. Instead we represent each option in the union type as a nullable field pointing to a nested object. This makes the structure much easier to decode in these kinds of languages, but does make it more verbose.

For a hypothetical typescript union type:

    | { type: 'plain', text: string, format: Formatting }
    | { type: 'link', text: string, href: string, format: Formatting }
    | { type: 'page-mention', page: { id: UUID, spaceId: UUID }, format: Formatting }
we end up producing a Java-style object like this:

    {
      plain?: {
        text: string,
        format: Formatting
      }
      link?: {
        text: string,
        href: string,
        format: Formatting
      }
      pageMention?: {
        page: {
            id: UUID,
            spaceId: UUID
        },
        format: Formatting
      }
    }
You can see the native format by looking at API traffic in your browser devtools. Generally the native format is more confusing without type annotations.

yencabulator

a year ago

Switching an enum on a `type` field is very much doable and common practice in statically typed languages.

Rust's serde calls that "internally tagged": https://serde.rs/enum-representations.html

jitl

a year ago

I specifically said "statically typed programming languages like Java or Golang" because those are languages without constructs that can easily represent something like a Typescript union-of-objects. There are many statically typed programming languages that do support union types!

Rust structured enums qualify - each enum case can have fields, so it's natural to represent a Typescript union type using a Rust enum; It's not quite the same (needs a newtype wrapper for each different combination of types in the union) but is very serviceable for the API use-case.

C and Zig have a different "union" concept where the caller needs to switch on a "tag" field like `type` in Typescript but with less compiler guidance to ensure you use the right union variant for a certain tag value.

Java and Go are more limited. Java can represent an "internally tagged" union as a superclass with subclasses, and Go can represent as an interface type with a method for getting the variant, but both require the consumer to know all the subtypes, and perform their own "if canCast(supertypeValue, unionCaseSubclass1) { // handle case 1 } else if ..." structure, which substantially hinders discoverability and requires more work.

threeseed

a year ago

Actually today's Confluence is much better than Notion in my opinion.

It has a built in Figma style diagram/flow-chart editor which is handy for architecture documents, infinite array of plugins and the interface is simple, clean and focused.

Notion has become this kitchen sink app where even editing a table is a convoluted mess of an experience.

kiratp

a year ago

Try sending the bob straight to an LLM and have it give you markdown. Bet it works.

Pi9h

a year ago

If you are looking for a self-hostable Notion alternative, I am building Docmost, which is open source.

It has real-time collaboration and support for diagrams (drawio, excalidraw and mermaid).

It can be tempting to want to do it all, but I am focused on building a great wiki and documentation software.

GitHub: https://github.com/docmost/docmost

dcchambers

a year ago

I generally think Notion is a pretty great product but IMO it's the poster child for "jack of all trades, master of none."

Yes, lots of things can be done in Notion, but most of them are done better elsewhere with dedicated tools.

I think it's core functionality as a team wiki (aka a confluence replacement) is the one thing it does best and better than most competitors...

bastawhiz

a year ago

That's sort of the draw. I don't need the best bug tracker, I need a bug tracker that I can get pretty much whatever I need to do done in. I don't need the best wiki, I just need to be able to write reasonably formatted docs with syntax highlighting and links. Notion explicitly isn't the best at any of these things, it's maybe an 8/10 on the best of days. But it's priced at an 8/10 and the search works across the whole damn thing, and nothing that it does is really all that bad.

On the other hand, Confluence does really just one thing. But it doesn't do it especially well, and there's lots of things that it can do that are bolted on haphazardly. Go ahead, try to embed that Loom video. I double dog dare you to try to configure it to show Git commits from GitHub. IMO something that isn't good that's purpose built is actively worse than something that does everything pretty okay.

anonygler

a year ago

Notions kinda funny. It has this stickiness among a college aged, tech savvy demographic that’s not generating any revenue for them but has garnered a massive valuation relative to their revenue.

They want business from me, a tech savvy technical leader in an enterprise who mostly doesn’t care about what they offer. I want all my docs to live in Git, the way it does in Google’s g3doc.

We use Notion and, while it seems better than Confluence, I’ve never actually authored a single thing in it. It has no overlap with my goals. The world should be accessible from my IDE, and if I were them that’s where I’d really focus: a bi-directional sync and a first class VS Code plugin for whatever their file format looks like.

lmm

a year ago

They have no value-add for developer-only documentation that exists in Git. Most of the value of Notion comes from it being usable by non-developers (but still tolerable for developers).

felipefar

a year ago

It seems that Notion is a kind of product that tries to solve issues from many areas, so it has everything that almost solves a meaningful problem for the user, but not quite. So the burden is on the user to go that extra mile, who will have to search for templates, memorize how non-standard tech works just to setup and maintain a system that only the maintainer knows how it works.

Some people use Notion for research and academic writing, which is the same use case for my software (https://getcahier.com). By specializing on this specific use case, I've been able to: offer a standard data model that's widely used in the field (bibtex), innovate in the PDF reader in the direction that my users need (by adding scrollbar markers for the relative position of highlights), and provide clear instructions to users on how to use the software. In principle, learning to use the software is learning how to perform an activity better - in this case, formal or informal research. When working with a software that's too general the user will always have to ask himself an additional question: "now, how do I make it do what I need?".

As the mathematician Hardy used to say, a beautiful theorem is one that is not too specific but also that is not too general - it has to strike a balance between the two.

supriyo-biswas

a year ago

I don't think is as big of a deal the author is making out to be - such pages are usually written out of SEO considerations.

If there's a conversation within a company about getting dedicated CRM software and they're already a Notion user or strongly considering Notion for their wikis and documentation, getting the word out there that Notion can also function like a reasonable CRM replacement can help close that deal or prevent a conversation about how Notion might not meet their needs.

n_ary

a year ago

Notion is cool and many new project owners/managers love it while grumpy oldies live by Jira/Conflience.

However, Notion kind of gives me the vibes Evernote cult of the ancients we have forgotten.

That being said, I used Notion on early days as my brain-dump for everything until I found that my needs are just putting some text and images, then I moved to simplenoteapp(also from forgotten stone age) and substitute with Bear or Apple Notes.

anh690136

a year ago

I started as a Notion user, but then it gets complicated and overwhelming quickly. It can be a good database and beautiful system, but for individual use cases, it’s too much for ADHD. I tried to use Apple Notes and Docs from then, but with too many notes, insights get buried and cannot be found easily. So I built an AI note app called saner.ai since & it worked better for me at least.

ethics13

a year ago

Aer you using Apple Notes and Docs now?

eedeebee

a year ago

Whenever I have to use Notion, I find it a waste of time compared to other tools :(

tiffanyh

a year ago

Curation.

Much like how SharePoint at most companies turn into a zombie wasteland of random unorganized documents, this also happens with Notion.

All of these types of products need their customers to effectively have someone dedicated to curation, organization and do librarian task - to maintain a good hygiene.

Otherwise, any type of team collaboration tool will get unwieldy super fast.

nsonha

a year ago

It's always amazed me that Notion got as popular as it did. It's not exactly user-friendly nor technically cappable (not having API or any kind of external integration for most of its existence).

There seems to be a group of nerds that's apparently pretty huge and have enough decision making power that it was able to tap into.

bigyikes

a year ago

Funny, but how wrong are they? I haven’t had the misfortune of using Salesforce, but isn’t it a glorified relational DB in the same way that Jira is?

I know a few people at Notion, and one thing I can say is that they have taste, in the way Apple has taste. I think this shows in their product.

lovethevoid

a year ago

We’re all glorified relational DB when you think about it lol

Notion was one of THE new tastemakers. Every startup copying their designs, now there’s AI generators to make “notion style art”. To see their new pages and additions have such clunky copyrighting is disappointing and I hope just temporary, not a sign the tastemakers have left the company.

jprete

a year ago

Copyrighting, or copy-writing?

lovethevoid

a year ago

Maybe I should hire a copy-writer!

jprete

a year ago

I really wasn't sure!

But to give you a more substantive response, I think the tastemakers are not in control in the slightest. Everything about Notion now screams "we don't give a crap about note-taking or personal wikis, we want a piece of that juicy enterprise market".

makeitdouble

a year ago

Notion defnitely had something to it when it only had to be a documentation platform. It was fast, clean and elegant, and that helped to forgive the missing bits (table support or plantUML kind of plugins)

But now that they've added a ton of features requested left and right, and effectively presented Notion as a one-stop solution to every documentation problem, I don't see much taste and elegance persisting. Not that the people you know lost their taste, more that it doesn't matter if they have to say yes to absolutely everything to keep being a one-stop solution that does it all.

In my or people started changing the way they write to stop triggering Notion features, and on the other side figjam and spreadsheet documents are coming back even as it could have been a Notion page.

There's definitely a shift IMHO. Notion will keep being used, but it might not be the first choice when other simpler options are available.

talldayo

a year ago

> I think this shows in their product.

I really don't. Notion is one of those tools that entrepreneurs gravitate towards for it's simplicity, and then engineers rip out for being a parasite. At the end of the day it's an overpriced CMS that can very easily be replaced by any number of different alternatives. Their "taste" is just as overrated and overpriced as Apple's is.

bapr

a year ago

[dead]

saltcod

a year ago

Hasn't come up much here, but part of the appeal is that Notion is extremely flexible. You can create a regular old company knowledge base, but also feed in/out things from a ton of other systems and organize them.

Notion's main strength and stickiness imo is as a hub.

ksec

a year ago

I am reading all the comments and I am feel very different with the general sentiments here.

Notion is like Excel. It isn't or wasn't meant to be used in certain ways, but its simplicity and flexility meant 99% of the world is running on Excel. From SMEs to Fortune 500s. Because that is what normal non-tech users, from managers to exec know how to use and understand.

There are a lot I dont like about Notion. Mostly on performance. But I valued it a lot because that is how 70% of my team understand and can continue to work together.

amai

a year ago

I never understood the hype about Notion. It will vendor-lockin your data like sharepoint, Word, Google Docs, Apple Notes and Confluence already do. Why do we need another solution like this on the market?

mvkel

a year ago

We switched from Google Workspace to Notion around 2018. It worked really well as a company wiki. A lot of the exec team lived in there.

The most painful part, the part that led to us switching back, was how painfully slow Notion was. Thanks to Electron, it used an obscene amount of ram, and a lot of opportunities to jot an idea down, or file something in the right place, were lost because of that slight lag.

Like being forced to cold-start Chrome to visit any website.

Knowing it would feel tedious to open Notion made me reconsider if the idea was worth writing down at all.

In some cases, it was!

niyogi

a year ago

notion was the beneficiary of the mass exodus of users who felt betrayed by evernote's weird pricing change many years ago. they had a great evernote importer which made it easy to migrate and then grew way beyond the elegant simple product they once were.

a new notion is lurking somewhere waiting to ride in the wake of a growing disgruntled pile of notion users

euroderf

a year ago

Visualising another in a series of great migrations, where a mass of leaderbirds takes wing and suddenly the entire flock is in the air and heading south.

ryanschneider

a year ago

Not that I expect them to fix it at this point since it seems to be a known issue, but just in case anyone from Notion is watching please fix the macOS app’s CPU usage. On a brand new M3 MacBook Pro each tab takes about 10% of one core _non-stop_ even in the background. I have to constantly cull tabs or my machine becomes noticeably less responsive.

wyan

a year ago

This was happening to me on an M1 until I realised it wasn't a Universal Binary and reinstalled the correct version.

euroderf

a year ago

Good grief. How is this even possible ? What on earth is going on ?

Extra points for answers in the form of questions.

wokwokwok

a year ago

https://www.notion.so/templates/category/crm

> Streamline your customer relationships with Notion's CRM Templates

It's a joke, but it's also not a joke.

I mean, come on. Is notion really pitching itself as a CRM?

It's not a CRM. Anyone who uses it as a CRM is an idiot, bluntly.

...

https://www.notion.so/use-case/crm

Oh, wait. I guess it's a supported use case. I uh... take it back... I guess...

> If you don’t want to use a dedicated CRM platform or start from a template, you can use a no-code platform like Notion to build a knowledge base or team homepage and modify it to fit your CRM needs.

Yeah, I guess some people will think that's a good idea.

makeitdouble

a year ago

This is definitely a thing.

Saw it happen first hand for project management: Notion started promoting the Task Board/GANTT like view of the databases as a fully supported use-case, and the bean counters came straight away to ask if we really needed a dedicated ticket management system.

As our use case was relatively simple it was borderline doable, and our dedicated system went away, even as we knew there will be rough edges. It's not great, but not bad enough to justify paying a full license price for a more polished product.

theGnuMe

a year ago

I just want an AI assistant that can organize things for me in some kind of note taking /wiki/something… it needs to take raw data and make it useful… you know like an assitant would, specifically around projects etc…

ilikerashers

a year ago

I use notion and like using it. But it’s high contrast Jira.

Yes it’s decluttered but it’s not a very sticky product.

beryilma

a year ago

Notion and Obsidian will be dead in couple years.

I see academics going crazy with Obsidian to organize and link their precious little ideas and research articles together. But, only to create an overwhelming mess that they will be afraid to look back to in couple years.

Anybody, remember MindMap? Same idea as Obsidian and it is all but dead at this point.

pentagrama

a year ago

Notion feels like early Tarantino.

moralestapia

a year ago

*yawn*

I wish I had a 70 million/year mid-life crisis funded by web-based notepad.

Fire-Dragon-DoL

a year ago

I find incredibly disappointing that so many new features have been walled behind higher tiers.

Notion forgot that we pay monthly price so that they can keep developing their software to our benefit too

meindnoch

a year ago

Is anyone still using Notion? Serious question.

qudat

a year ago

Companies love it because it’s an all-in-one knowledge base

Ali_Jiwani

a year ago

If you wrote a book. I would buy it.

boiler_up800

a year ago

Not sure what the point of this is. Every company I’ve worked at stores everything in notion. Managers and ops people keep it up to date and organize processes in there.

prdonahue

a year ago

Notion was clearly made by people who do not use or understand keyboard shortcuts; you can't even properly select text without using the mouse.

It's been somewhat maddening switching from Confluence.

remram

a year ago

I have the opposite complaint: you can't even reliably select text without also using the keyboard! Half the time I drag to select, it starts moving a block. Half the time I click to navigate, it starts a selection instead (as if I had not released the mouse from previous click). I need to press the Escape key and try again.

Notion to me is the prime example for "too much JavaScript". Opening a note in a tab take 10 seconds and interrupts me half the time with some random news or a prompt to try some AI feature.

randito

a year ago

My experience with Notion keyboard use is different. It's not 100% VIM hands-on-keyboard mouse-free but it's getting there. If there was only a "insert after this block" shortcut.

My favorite is to type something then /turnh3 where /turn let's you turn the block into something else.

hinkley

a year ago

I’ve gotten out of the habit but I could definitely see how in a set of dependent code reviews one might want to be able to update a sequence of statuses in a matter of minutes to land a bunch of changes back to back to back, plowing through using a CLI or keyboard shortcuts.