6 ms·

I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it. Even worse, is you go on product hunt and there are nonstop 'product' launches which are just notion templat

• tomrod 4y ago
  This article reads like an ad. Perhaps I live under a tech rock, but I have not heard of notion before today. And I don't like that it is being shilled.
  • waboremo 4y ago
    I envy the person who has been able to avoid Notion advertising in the past ~5 years.
    • tomrod 4y ago
      Rare is it that I am envied. Obsidian I've enjoyed, but find it difficult to become fluent with it.
      • iamthirsty 4y ago
        It is almost unbelievable to me that anyone who's been able to become aware of & use a niche app like Obsidian has never come across Notion. Obsidian is definitely a power-user tool, which one would usually use after considering the other options, with Notion being almost as default as a choice as Evernote once was. Additionally, a lot of apps now are even using it as their support bases. It almost feels unavoidable at this point.
        • tomrod 4y ago
          Not sure what to tell you. A sharp new developer I respect a lot pointed me towards Obsidian, and so it goes. Other than that, my recent search history shows the past few years are focused on python, pola.rs, Rust, data science, databricks, Oracle, Postgres, DuckDB, and the legal and administrative aspects of running a business, with the occasional dataset documentation search.
        • pcthrowaway 4y ago
          This is equally bizarre to me, and I haven't used either. I definitely hear about Obsidian more on HN and at work because coworkers use it. But knowing what Obsidian is and not Notion is sort of like knowing what Markdown is but having never heard of Microsoft Word.
          • iamthirsty 3y ago
            Couldn't have said it better myself. Seems kind of weird to me, but if the poster is telling the truth, it's like buying an iPhone and never hearing about the iPad.
        • antod 4y ago
          There's two of us! Although Obsidian only made it to awareness for me - I haven't used it. But I hadn't heard of Notion.
        • barbariangrunge 4y ago
          Could you explain obsidian to me? It just looks like a markdown editor with hyperlinks to me
          • tomrod 3y ago
            That is my take too. For R&D/tech transfer I have found it useful, but I haven't had my socks blown away yet.
    • themadturk 4y ago
      I had never even heard of Notion before I started looking at Obsidian.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    The website is Technology Review. If course it's an ad.
• waboremo 4y ago
  This isn't an endorsement for Notion, I also dislike it and use other tools. I can see why some do however, it's a solid second brain organizational tool, somewhere to place things "long term" and keep them. It's a less "active" tool, which is also why for some people I think Notion is the wrong solution but for others works great. Think: internal team documents in one central place (less active) vs updating your app's documentation multiple times an hour (more active), the latter of which is not what Notion is good for at all. Also I will say, with their API you can technically hook up whatever databases you have within Notion for use, so it can easily become a place to store your blog notes and use them without copying/pasting. But again, blog notes are rarely changing so you see the pattern here I hope. I also don't get the notion template hype on gumroad/etsy/producthunt/etc. You can create them yourself within seconds, but that's the nature of the "productivity industry", you get big bucks for the mere idea that your product will make their life easier/faster.
  • epolanski 4y ago
    > the latter of which is not what Notion is good for at all why?
    • calvinmorrison 4y ago
      Especially since you can share notion webs publically per page. Perfect for latest documentation, job postings, etc.
      • waboremo 4y ago
        Depends what kind of documentation. General team docs? Yeah great those barely change. Same with job postings, outside of an "active" toggle, there's not much that changes for them. Everything else? You waste too much time dealing with notion lag. A lot of the integrations also suck and are far too limited in what they do. One final note on docs, one of the best moves in recent years is expressing difficult concepts through interactive content. Notion cannot handle this at all. Static or nothing on notion!
    • waboremo 4y ago
• gms7777 4y ago
  I use Notion as a personal work notebook. I like it for its lack of rigidity and fixed structure. I've always struggled with tools like Trello because they have a specific model that you need to fit your usage into. Then again, I'm not a Notion power user, nor do I make heavy use of templates outside of a few I've designed myself, so I'm definitely not one of the "hype"rs
  • epolanski 4y ago
    You and I I believe are the same type of user. I barely ever used databases. I have a journal with my daily work todos, notes about technology, company, people I want to keep. It's god for that I can share content with my friends/coworkers, it does already way too many things for me.
    • nickwritesit 3y ago
      Yup, this is me too. I use Notion every day so I'm a fan in that sense but I'm also on the free personal plan so I guess I'm not a customer. But I love it for second brain purposes (especially with Readwise) + being the homebase for all of my text.
• jitl 4y ago
  (I work for Notion) Notion is also "basically just a bunch of lists", plus titles. Pages in Notion are a title, and a list of blocks. Text blocks are a title (the text of the block) and a list, it's indented children. We also have boards like Trello, and you can drag and drop list items between boards, pages, paragraphs, everywhere. Maybe you could see it as everything you like about Trello, but applied to more modalities of content.
  • shafyy 4y ago
    What are you talking about? Notion is clearly not just a bunch of lists like Trello is.
    • samueldurante 4y ago
      The implementation of the Notion can be bunch of lists, like Trello. However Notion's UI doesn't pass this feeling.
    • eropple 4y ago
      It can be, if you want it to be. https://www.notion.so/templates/kanban-board https://www.notion.so/templates/kanban-board I use this all the time, alongside my other personal databases and such. I wish there was an open source or self-hostable gizmo that was as flexible as Notion is.
    • jitl 4y ago
      Semantically our data model is an infinitely nested hierarchical tree of lists, although the UI might not look or feel like "just a list". Our editor is more like an "outliner" than a traditional word processor, and before January 2022, you could't even select text across multiple blocks. We rebuilt the editor to work like both an outliner and a traditional word processor at the same time. You can still "feel" the tree/list structure when you select and drag multiple blocks around, or use indent/dedent - you can't indent a block multiple times within another block because that doesn't make sense in the tree structure. I wrote a bit about turning our outliner into a word processor here: https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1483918085384028163 https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1483918085384028163 And also about the data model itself here: https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion
• jdgoesmarching 4y ago
  Weird that nobody’s mentioned it yet, but the main value proposition of Notion is that is uses mini-relational databases instead of tables. It’s like Airtable baked inside of a note app. It has a ton of downsides like being slow, not having offline access, and no E2E encryption, but there are few tools that execute well on the approachable database concept. I wish there were more, because the standard approach of doing bizarre spreadsheet hacks to achieve the same functionality is much less intuitive to me. The reason there’s an entire weird industry around Notion is not surprising to most people here: relational databases are useful. Unfortunately, most database tools are too unapproachable or cumbersome for most. Notion and Airtable wrapped a good UX around creating semi-primitive rdbs and here we are.
  • epolanski 4y ago
    Could you expand in more details?
  • sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Be sure to mention that if you dare venture down the path of learning about this mysterious mini-relational database, emerging with useful knowledge will cost you three quarters of your sanity and the soul of your firstborn. It’s not quite that bad, but every. Single. Time. that I’ve been intrigued about notion’s advanced features, I’ve slapped myself two hours later and said “get back to work; you could spend your whole life learning about this. Or at least your whole weekend.”
    • jeron 4y ago
      For me it's one of those learn it once and get it over with. They really are powerful and if you spend one weekend on learning, it should be enough to go a long way.
  • bovermyer 4y ago
    Atlassian's Confluence is apparently launching databases as a feature soon. The screenshots I've seen look very similar to Notion.
  • 4y ago
• iamthirsty 4y ago
  > I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it. > I don't get what I am missing. 100% agree. Notion doesn't work like my brain when it comes to documents, formatting, structuring — I ended up spending most of my time configuring systems and formatting than actually inputting information & accomplishing things. I've tried a few times to get into it, and see what others see in it. I just can't.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    > I ended up spending most of my time configuring systems and formatting than actually inputting information & accomplishing things. I end up feeling this way about a lot of “productivity” tools like notion, obsidian, and ESPECIALLY Arch browser. I don’t want to have to learn how to use a tool that I’m using to do something fundamental like visit websites or take notes. Give me the barest abstraction possible over these features. Do not ask me to make extra decisions to do basic things like open a tab (decide between 3 levels of ephemeral and how it relates to other tabs). And don’t automatically close shit on some arbitrary schedule which can’t be disabled!
    • whatarethembits 3y ago
      Subjective counterpoint to Arc browser; I spent all of 10 minutes getting used to it, and it’s been a game changer ever since. I can’t actually use chrome/firefox again. That’s wild! Maybe it just fits with the way I use the web naturally, but moving to other browsers is like moving back to tabless IE after getting used to tabbed Firefox. Automatic (very important) Picture in Picture mode, and their way of organising/deleting tabs is a game changer.
    • iamthirsty 4y ago
      Ironically, the best productivity tools I've used in & for the past ten years has been Things, and my Moleskine notebooks. Incredibly simple system, and while both can be considered a bit expensive, the work every time, without fail, in a way that makes sense and creates the results I expect and require. I've found the simple things that are high quality work the best for me, in almost all aspects of life.
• blitzar 4y ago
  > I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it. Remember Evernote ... that was going to change your life once upon at time. Are any of these things bad? Not really. Will any of them change your life ... almost certainly not, unless your life is making hype content on social media for these products and you manage to become a fully fledged "influencer".
• epolanski 4y ago
  I think it's okay, I use it because it was the first polished app I could read and edit notes from so many devices. But the idea Notion is a 100M business, let alone a 10B valued company is madness.
• csomar 4y ago
  You are not missing anything. It's stupid, but hey, some people are paying for that stuff and and some people are making money out of it. Who are we to judge.
• meken 4y ago
  I’ve been meaning to try trello, notion is just so slow
• barbariangrunge 4y ago
  Kanbanflow > trello. Same thing, just nicer interface imho