11 ms·

Notion's mid-life crisis

213 points by krishna2 2y ago

amai 2y 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?
danpalmer 2y 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?
- sanex 2y 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.
- Multicomp 2y 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 2y 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.
  - muzani 2y 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.
  - arduinomancer 2y 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 2y 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.
- staplers 2y 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.
  - dcre 2y 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 2y 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-268fa5bcfa0f46b6bc29436b21676734 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 2y 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.
- PaulHoule 2y 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?
  - canadiantim 2y ago
    Is there a way to try your Fraxinus system?
    - sisyphus_coding 2y ago
      Me too please :^)
bigyikes 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    Copyrighting, or copy-writing?
    - lovethevoid 2y ago
      Maybe I should hire a copy-writer!
      - jprete 2y 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 2y 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.
wokwokwok 2y ago
https://www.notion.so/templates/category/crm 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 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 2y 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.
moralestapia 2y ago
*yawn* I wish I had a 70 million/year mid-life crisis funded by web-based notepad.
epiccoleman 2y 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 2y 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.
  - base698 2y 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 2y 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.
    - 2y ago
meindnoch 2y ago
Is anyone still using Notion? Serious question.
- qudat 2y ago
  Companies love it because it’s an all-in-one knowledge base
btown 2y 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 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 2y 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 2y ago
    Right now tabular data is where LLMs go to die but that's an active research area.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    I don't see why Notion-adjacent apps don't just deeply integrate SQLite for everything table-related. What am i missing ?
prdonahue 2y 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.
- randito 2y 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 2y 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.
- remram 2y 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.
anonygler 2y 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 2y 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).
boiler_up800 2y 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.
supriyo-biswas 2y 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.
skissane 2y 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.
- kiratp 2y ago
  Try sending the bob straight to an LLM and have it give you markdown. Bet it works.
- threeseed 2y 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.
- jitl 2y 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.
semiinfinitely 2y ago
Notion sucks and I hate it!
ilikerashers 2y 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.
karakanb 2y 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.
- mvkel 2y 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 2y ago
    All of Google is acquisitions
- lmm 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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!
felipefar 2y 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 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.
saltcod 2y 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.
Aurornis 2y 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.
- threeseed 2y 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.
  - dartos 2y 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.
    - llamaLord 2y ago
      Yeah but saying Jira is like Notion makes fundamentally no sense when Confluence is sitting like... Right there...
nsonha 2y 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.
Ali_Jiwani 2y ago
If you wrote a book. I would buy it.
Pi9h 2y 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 https://github.com/docmost/docmost
apsurd 2y 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!
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y 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 2y ago
    thia is the best assay i read on notion ever
- BadHumans 2y 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 2y ago
    Speaking as someone who tried quite hard to make it do the thing I wanted, not sure that's true.
  - pants2 2y ago
    Just don't try to center text on the page!
- 2y ago
eedeebee 2y ago
Whenever I have to use Notion, I find it a waste of time compared to other tools :(
- remram 2y ago
  Why?
breck 2y ago
It turns out, language matters. The PPS stack is about to eat the software world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth%27s_called_shot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth%27s_called_shot
dcchambers 2y 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 2y 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.
theGnuMe 2y 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…
niyogi 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
- euroderf 2y ago
  Good grief. How is this even possible ? What on earth is going on ? Extra points for answers in the form of questions.
- wyan 2y ago
  This was happening to me on an M1 until I realised it wasn't a Universal Binary and reinstalled the correct version.
pentagrama 2y ago
Notion feels like early Tarantino.
anh690136 2y 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 2y ago
  Aer you using Apple Notes and Docs now?
n_ary 2y 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.
tiffanyh 2y 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.
beryilma 2y 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.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y 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
ksec 2y 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.

213 points by krishna2 2y ago

amai 2y 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?

danpalmer 2y 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?

sanex 2y 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.
Multicomp 2y 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 2y 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.
- muzani 2y 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.
- arduinomancer 2y 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 2y 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.
staplers 2y 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.
- dcre 2y 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 2y 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-268fa5bcfa0f46b6bc29436b21676734 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 2y 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.
PaulHoule 2y 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?
- canadiantim 2y ago
  Is there a way to try your Fraxinus system?
  - sisyphus_coding 2y ago
    Me too please :^)

bigyikes 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  Copyrighting, or copy-writing?
  - lovethevoid 2y ago
    Maybe I should hire a copy-writer!
    - jprete 2y 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 2y 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.

wokwokwok 2y ago

https://www.notion.so/templates/category/crm 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 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 2y 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.

moralestapia 2y ago

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

epiccoleman 2y 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 2y 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.
- base698 2y 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 2y 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.
  - 2y ago

meindnoch 2y ago

Is anyone still using Notion? Serious question.

qudat 2y ago
Companies love it because it’s an all-in-one knowledge base

btown 2y 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 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 2y 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 2y ago
  Right now tabular data is where LLMs go to die but that's an active research area.
- euroderf 2y ago
  I don't see why Notion-adjacent apps don't just deeply integrate SQLite for everything table-related. What am i missing ?

prdonahue 2y 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.

randito 2y 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 2y 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.
remram 2y 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.

anonygler 2y 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 2y 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).

boiler_up800 2y 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.

supriyo-biswas 2y 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.

skissane 2y 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.

kiratp 2y ago
Try sending the bob straight to an LLM and have it give you markdown. Bet it works.
threeseed 2y 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.
jitl 2y 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.

semiinfinitely 2y ago

Notion sucks and I hate it!

ilikerashers 2y 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.

karakanb 2y 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.

mvkel 2y 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 2y ago
  All of Google is acquisitions
lmm 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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!

felipefar 2y 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 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.

saltcod 2y 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.

Aurornis 2y 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.

threeseed 2y 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.
- dartos 2y 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.
  - llamaLord 2y ago
    Yeah but saying Jira is like Notion makes fundamentally no sense when Confluence is sitting like... Right there...

nsonha 2y 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.

Ali_Jiwani 2y ago

If you wrote a book. I would buy it.

Pi9h 2y 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 https://github.com/docmost/docmost

apsurd 2y 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!

ilrwbwrkhv 2y 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 2y ago
  thia is the best assay i read on notion ever
BadHumans 2y 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 2y ago
  Speaking as someone who tried quite hard to make it do the thing I wanted, not sure that's true.
- pants2 2y ago
  Just don't try to center text on the page!
2y ago

eedeebee 2y ago

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

remram 2y ago
Why?

breck 2y ago

It turns out, language matters. The PPS stack is about to eat the software world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth%27s_called_shot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth%27s_called_shot

dcchambers 2y 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 2y 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.

theGnuMe 2y 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…

niyogi 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.

euroderf 2y ago
Good grief. How is this even possible ? What on earth is going on ? Extra points for answers in the form of questions.
wyan 2y ago
This was happening to me on an M1 until I realised it wasn't a Universal Binary and reinstalled the correct version.

pentagrama 2y ago

Notion feels like early Tarantino.

anh690136 2y 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 2y ago
Aer you using Apple Notes and Docs now?

n_ary 2y 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.

tiffanyh 2y 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.

beryilma 2y 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.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y 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

ksec 2y 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.