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Why is this all so buggy? I don’t know why people like Notion so much; I discover bugs literally every day using it with our team (we are paying members with 2

Why is this all so buggy? I don’t know why people like Notion so much; I discover bugs literally every day using it with our team (we are paying members with 2 companies). So another lame one; I click on this article in iOS safari and it pops open my iOS Notion app saying ‘this content doesn’t exist’. Well done! I will add it to the list, in Notion. It is the system with the highest popularity while also having the most bugs that I used in a long time. But not for long. It is also slow; started using some similar (but less feature rich) products and things like Joplin are so nice and snappy that I tend to forget the missing features.

time_to_smile 4y ago
> Why is this all so buggy? > started using some similar (but less feature rich) products You may have answered your own question here. At least in my experience, PMs at "feature rich" companies love to push for more new and exciting products (and what's more exciting than AI!?) and find it really annoying when devs talk about fixing bugs or improving existing processes for customers. I'm really hoping one positive result from the current economic turmoil is a return to focusing on delivering value to customers. I remember in years long past when product people viewed solving a customers problem as the key path to a successful company. But I guess years of cheap money and forgetting about the very idea of profit have made people realize that the real customer is VCs.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  One issue there I think is that Notion has had a number of investment rounds, according to crunchbase [0] they've gained $343.2M that way; that plus paying customers means they have a lot of money to burn. And investors don't like it when a company just sits on that money, they want results, they want to see growth, they want cool demos of cool new features or products. I mean you can rebuild the essence of what Notion is with less than $1M. They don't need that money to build more features; I'm convinced that writing the code is the cheapest part of product development these days, despite developers earning five figure sums + bonuses + stock options + $15 / serving premade fruit smoothies from a squeezed bag. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/notion-so/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/notion-so/company_fi...
jatins 4y ago
My view is that Notion is an utterly mediocre product with great marketing that also benefited from the rise of "productivity porn" videos on YT. It probably finds success in enterprise because it can replace a bunch of tools (confluence, jira, google docs, wikis) if you try really hard so maybe it makes financial sense. But in my experience it is not better than any of those in a 1:1 comparison. Okay, probably better than Confluence.
- emadabdulrahim 4y ago
  Could you name a better designed product that has the flexibility and feature set Notion has?
  - nucleogenesis 4y ago
    I was recently giving Coda a look and it’s got a lot of the same or similar features.
  - mushbino 4y ago
    It's a bit of a different model, but Guru is pretty cool.
  - blowski 4y ago
    That's like asking "can you name a product better at being Notion than Notion?". Rephrase the question as "what problems do you have which Notion is trying to solve, but you think there are better solutions on the market?". Personally, I prefer plain-text where I own the content, so Obsidian works great. When I need to collaborate on something in realtime, I usually prefer a more focused tool, like Google Sheets, Trello, Excalidraw.
  - jatins 4y ago
    For that feature set and flexibility, I can't. However, for individual use cases I can. Note taking: Bear, Apple Notes, Obsidian Project management: Jira, Linear, Height Wikis: can't think of any IMO the flexibility and feature set Notion offers makes it a jack of all trades, but master of none tool. Maybe the sum turns out to be greater than parts for some people but for personal use I haven't enjoyed it. Fwiw I felt the same way about Coda. So it's a general comment on this category of "all in one" doc tools.
ainar-g 4y ago
I agree with everything. Notion is essentially unusable for me. My “favourite” bug is that when you import a markdown document, if you have a piece of inline monospace text that starts with a hyphen, the hyphen will disappear. So, something like this: Use the `-v` option to enable verbose mode. Will render like this: > Use the v option to enable verbose mode. A-a-and that's how you get a lot of confused people wondering, if your documentation just sucks.
- russell_h 4y ago
  In Notion’s defense, copy/paste didn’t really work at all until very recently. It’s improving.
  - layer8 4y ago
    That’s quite surprising to read for a note-taking application that launched six years ago.
  - quanticle 4y ago
    How is that a defense of Notion?
mtremsal 4y ago
Notion is Sharepoint for zoomers. It’s an okay wiki with slow UX, underwhelming collaboration, and a slew of tacked-on over-engineered features that have better alternatives elsewhere.
- ayberk 4y ago
  Any alternatives you'd recommend? I'm not happy with Notion at all, but I haven't been able to find a good alternative for my own personal use: - Sync across all devices - Hierarchical notes - Note-level sharing for collaboration
  - mtremsal 4y ago
    For personal use I rely on GitJournal. It plays really well with obsidian + git on laptop. I haven’t automated 1-click note-level publishing; instead I have a personal website that renders markdown. For collaboration I default to Google Docs instead.
thiht 4y ago
I use Notion extensively and I have to say I have no idea which bugs you're talking about. After searching for a good note taking app for years, Notion has been life changing for me. Honestly the only 2 issues I have in mind are: - the sidebar shows collapsing arrows even for pages with no subpages - there's no way to open 2 pages side by side, so I have to open 2 windows and put them side by side > It is also slow It's... really not? Clicking on a page takes like 300ms to load, and once you're editing a page, there's nothing that can even be slow
- richardlblair 4y ago
  I like Notion - I think it's a good product and I think what they have built is really cool. But OP is right - it's so buggy. Every time I create a new page it says the page is in the trash. Every time. The release of Teamspaces was sloppy at best. Some basic computing functionality like highlighting and attempting to copy just doesn't work sometimes. It's so frustrating. If you accidentally grab the block and not the content, you're screwed. There are also a bunch of usability issues. For instance, I want a DB but I don't want it to show in the sidebar. Again, I agree, it's great, but it's full of bugs.
- TheDong 4y ago
  > once you're editing a page, there's nothing that can even be slow Create a new notion doc. Create a json formatted codeblock. Paste in the ~250 lines from https://gist.github.com/keeguon/2310008 https://gist.github.com/keeguon/2310008 Add a new made-up entry. Back-space it. Add it again. I typed for ~10s to do that. It took notion _5 minutes_ to catch up to my typing. I am not making this number up. Multiple minutes of lag between input and it rendering is the worst I have ever seen from any text editor. This is for a ~250 line document, which is admittedly in a json codeblock... but still, 250 lines is nothing for a computer, how do you make it take 5 minutes to append a character to a ~9000 character string? Of course, you'll say "nothing that can be slow" did not refer to codeblocks because everyone knows notion's codeblocks are unusably slow. Codeblocks are the most striking example, but other things are slow. Let me give examples: Time to type "cat" into the notion search box (from entering characters to it rendering the actual text) on a large notion workspace - 3.5s Time for the search to complete for "cat" - 20s Input lag for just typing regular text on a ~3000 line normal document - 350ms 350ms may not seem like a lot of input lag, but it is very noticeable to me. It causes me to make typos and generally makes notion feel bad to type in. No other webpage I use has input lag this bad. Now, admittedly, that input lag isn't on every page for me, only about half the notion pages I edit are that bad, but it still makes me dread ever typing text into notion. Note as well, this is not on an m1 macbook, just a 2 year old i7 (mobile) processor running firefox. Perhaps I need to upgrade my hardware so that I can run this particular text editor.
nickfromseattle 4y ago
> It is also slow I wanted to build a culture of documentation in my organization, and asking many people to use an app dozens of times per day - performance matters! We ended up with Slite and are very happy 3 years and 1,000 documents later. Slite is not nearly as feature rich as Notion (and that's totally fine for us!), but it does what it needs too extremely well.
RHSeeger 4y ago
I have to use Notion for work sometimes and it makes me so angry. It just... it's painful trying to do anything with it. It's like the entire thing was written by junior devs who thought "hey, we can do this cool thing" without ever bothering to consider _if_ it should do that thing (like hide a toolbar unless you mouse over it... but the spot it's in is blank anyways, so now you don't know it's there unless by luck AND you don't save space). And then they implement it poorly. So there's a lot of poor ui choices that barely work. Arg. I will play the devil's advocate to myself though... I know people that love it. I'm just not one of them.
christophepas 4y ago
If you like performance and have a team usage, Slite should be an interesting choice to explore. Disclaimer I'm the founder, hundreds of team come from notion every month for this reason. Our search is much more powerful and lightning fast, navigation and doc loading is super fast as well, we put extra care there.

time_to_smile 4y ago

> Why is this all so buggy? > started using some similar (but less feature rich) products You may have answered your own question here. At least in my experience, PMs at "feature rich" companies love to push for more new and exciting products (and what's more exciting than AI!?) and find it really annoying when devs talk about fixing bugs or improving existing processes for customers. I'm really hoping one positive result from the current economic turmoil is a return to focusing on delivering value to customers. I remember in years long past when product people viewed solving a customers problem as the key path to a successful company. But I guess years of cheap money and forgetting about the very idea of profit have made people realize that the real customer is VCs.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
One issue there I think is that Notion has had a number of investment rounds, according to crunchbase [0] they've gained $343.2M that way; that plus paying customers means they have a lot of money to burn. And investors don't like it when a company just sits on that money, they want results, they want to see growth, they want cool demos of cool new features or products. I mean you can rebuild the essence of what Notion is with less than $1M. They don't need that money to build more features; I'm convinced that writing the code is the cheapest part of product development these days, despite developers earning five figure sums + bonuses + stock options + $15 / serving premade fruit smoothies from a squeezed bag. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/notion-so/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/notion-so/company_fi...

jatins 4y ago

My view is that Notion is an utterly mediocre product with great marketing that also benefited from the rise of "productivity porn" videos on YT. It probably finds success in enterprise because it can replace a bunch of tools (confluence, jira, google docs, wikis) if you try really hard so maybe it makes financial sense. But in my experience it is not better than any of those in a 1:1 comparison. Okay, probably better than Confluence.

emadabdulrahim 4y ago
Could you name a better designed product that has the flexibility and feature set Notion has?
- nucleogenesis 4y ago
  I was recently giving Coda a look and it’s got a lot of the same or similar features.
- mushbino 4y ago
  It's a bit of a different model, but Guru is pretty cool.
- blowski 4y ago
  That's like asking "can you name a product better at being Notion than Notion?". Rephrase the question as "what problems do you have which Notion is trying to solve, but you think there are better solutions on the market?". Personally, I prefer plain-text where I own the content, so Obsidian works great. When I need to collaborate on something in realtime, I usually prefer a more focused tool, like Google Sheets, Trello, Excalidraw.
- jatins 4y ago
  For that feature set and flexibility, I can't. However, for individual use cases I can. Note taking: Bear, Apple Notes, Obsidian Project management: Jira, Linear, Height Wikis: can't think of any IMO the flexibility and feature set Notion offers makes it a jack of all trades, but master of none tool. Maybe the sum turns out to be greater than parts for some people but for personal use I haven't enjoyed it. Fwiw I felt the same way about Coda. So it's a general comment on this category of "all in one" doc tools.

ainar-g 4y ago

I agree with everything. Notion is essentially unusable for me. My “favourite” bug is that when you import a markdown document, if you have a piece of inline monospace text that starts with a hyphen, the hyphen will disappear. So, something like this: Use the `-v` option to enable verbose mode. Will render like this: > Use the v option to enable verbose mode. A-a-and that's how you get a lot of confused people wondering, if your documentation just sucks.

russell_h 4y ago
In Notion’s defense, copy/paste didn’t really work at all until very recently. It’s improving.
- layer8 4y ago
  That’s quite surprising to read for a note-taking application that launched six years ago.
- quanticle 4y ago
  How is that a defense of Notion?

mtremsal 4y ago

Notion is Sharepoint for zoomers. It’s an okay wiki with slow UX, underwhelming collaboration, and a slew of tacked-on over-engineered features that have better alternatives elsewhere.

ayberk 4y ago
Any alternatives you'd recommend? I'm not happy with Notion at all, but I haven't been able to find a good alternative for my own personal use: - Sync across all devices - Hierarchical notes - Note-level sharing for collaboration
- mtremsal 4y ago
  For personal use I rely on GitJournal. It plays really well with obsidian + git on laptop. I haven’t automated 1-click note-level publishing; instead I have a personal website that renders markdown. For collaboration I default to Google Docs instead.

thiht 4y ago

I use Notion extensively and I have to say I have no idea which bugs you're talking about. After searching for a good note taking app for years, Notion has been life changing for me. Honestly the only 2 issues I have in mind are: - the sidebar shows collapsing arrows even for pages with no subpages - there's no way to open 2 pages side by side, so I have to open 2 windows and put them side by side > It is also slow It's... really not? Clicking on a page takes like 300ms to load, and once you're editing a page, there's nothing that can even be slow

richardlblair 4y ago
I like Notion - I think it's a good product and I think what they have built is really cool. But OP is right - it's so buggy. Every time I create a new page it says the page is in the trash. Every time. The release of Teamspaces was sloppy at best. Some basic computing functionality like highlighting and attempting to copy just doesn't work sometimes. It's so frustrating. If you accidentally grab the block and not the content, you're screwed. There are also a bunch of usability issues. For instance, I want a DB but I don't want it to show in the sidebar. Again, I agree, it's great, but it's full of bugs.
TheDong 4y ago
> once you're editing a page, there's nothing that can even be slow Create a new notion doc. Create a json formatted codeblock. Paste in the ~250 lines from https://gist.github.com/keeguon/2310008 https://gist.github.com/keeguon/2310008 Add a new made-up entry. Back-space it. Add it again. I typed for ~10s to do that. It took notion _5 minutes_ to catch up to my typing. I am not making this number up. Multiple minutes of lag between input and it rendering is the worst I have ever seen from any text editor. This is for a ~250 line document, which is admittedly in a json codeblock... but still, 250 lines is nothing for a computer, how do you make it take 5 minutes to append a character to a ~9000 character string? Of course, you'll say "nothing that can be slow" did not refer to codeblocks because everyone knows notion's codeblocks are unusably slow. Codeblocks are the most striking example, but other things are slow. Let me give examples: Time to type "cat" into the notion search box (from entering characters to it rendering the actual text) on a large notion workspace - 3.5s Time for the search to complete for "cat" - 20s Input lag for just typing regular text on a ~3000 line normal document - 350ms 350ms may not seem like a lot of input lag, but it is very noticeable to me. It causes me to make typos and generally makes notion feel bad to type in. No other webpage I use has input lag this bad. Now, admittedly, that input lag isn't on every page for me, only about half the notion pages I edit are that bad, but it still makes me dread ever typing text into notion. Note as well, this is not on an m1 macbook, just a 2 year old i7 (mobile) processor running firefox. Perhaps I need to upgrade my hardware so that I can run this particular text editor.

nickfromseattle 4y ago

> It is also slow I wanted to build a culture of documentation in my organization, and asking many people to use an app dozens of times per day - performance matters! We ended up with Slite and are very happy 3 years and 1,000 documents later. Slite is not nearly as feature rich as Notion (and that's totally fine for us!), but it does what it needs too extremely well.

RHSeeger 4y ago

I have to use Notion for work sometimes and it makes me so angry. It just... it's painful trying to do anything with it. It's like the entire thing was written by junior devs who thought "hey, we can do this cool thing" without ever bothering to consider _if_ it should do that thing (like hide a toolbar unless you mouse over it... but the spot it's in is blank anyways, so now you don't know it's there unless by luck AND you don't save space). And then they implement it poorly. So there's a lot of poor ui choices that barely work. Arg. I will play the devil's advocate to myself though... I know people that love it. I'm just not one of them.

christophepas 4y ago

If you like performance and have a team usage, Slite should be an interesting choice to explore. Disclaimer I'm the founder, hundreds of team come from notion every month for this reason. Our search is much more powerful and lightning fast, navigation and doc loading is super fast as well, we put extra care there.