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Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?

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Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?

#201

Post by prower »

bostonsre wrote: post #194
freedomben wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the disconnect here is that the angry people are viewing this one person's response as representative of the entire company and as though it was filtered through a PR rep, while the more understanding people are viewing this person a person speaking for themselves, not necessarily the whole company. The person could have just copy pasted the canned response with no help and it sounds like a lot of peopl…

Yea, that sounds about right. I think I recall being a support rep for trading software in college and I've interacted with those front line workers for a long time now so I have a lot of empathy for them. They are just people trying to do their job and I don't recall a single support rep that wasn't just trying to do their job well. People are complicated and socializing is hard, especially when it's not in person.…

This industry mostly provides very ephemeral services, so it's almost never a matter of life and death (the entire multi-million email marketing sector could implode overnight and life would go on just fine), but you still charge money for those ephemeral services, and the least you could do would be to take your screw-ups a bit seriously.

I repeat, there's a big, big value in being friendly and basically "a human", but the very first starting interaction must be serious, not a joke.

Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?

#202

Post by soco »

ivanzhao wrote: post #125

Hi, Ivan here. I am the CEO of Notion. I'm really, really sorry about this experience! Our in-product export feature exports to a single file, and for very large workspaces this doesn't scale very well. (I know this is not an excuse for this experience. We'll do better and prioritize fixing this!) Could you email me at ivan at makenotion.com? We'll work to fix this for you immediately. Apologies, and really appreciat…

There's the technical problem and there's also the human problem of answering the customer problems in such a way. You need two fixes.

Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?

#203

Post by kurgan_ »

First rule of SaaS evaluation: the tool MUST have an export feature that works.

Notion grew massively with a targeted campaign "move from Evernote to Notion". Evernote's export feature works perfectly and you are free to go anytime. That's what honest SaaS companies do.

Notion seems to be a SaaS that wants to own your data. Their API was a promise for years until they had to give up. They wanted to be your walled "one stop shop": eyeballs and data 100% in their tool (like Google Workspace).

BTW, second rule of SaaS selection: choose a SaaS that do not make money selling your data to the big adtech players. Read the privacy policy!

Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?

#204

Post by boplicity »

kurgan_ wrote: post #203

First rule of SaaS evaluation: the tool MUST have an export feature that works. Notion grew massively with a targeted campaign "move from Evernote to Notion". Evernote's export feature works perfectly and you are free to go anytime. That's what honest SaaS companies do. Notion seems to be a SaaS that wants to own your data. Their API was a promise for years until they had to give up. They wanted to be your walled "on…

I agree completely with this. I've recently started considering SAAS companies for a certain area, and I'm starting to lean more heavily towards open source self-hosted software, for the simple reason that I get complete control over the data. It's not fun to build a core part of our business under someone else's control.

Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?

#205

Post by kcartlidge »

hluska wrote: post #164
realitysballs wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a millennial myself I appreciate this type of lingo. I think it’s a generational or cultural shift if some sort

I’m in my mid-forties. The tech industry wasn’t at all like this when I was young. Somewhere along the lines, people stopped being nice and having a personality apparently became a personality flaw. I’m taking a break from this fucking site. I can’t believe the extent to which my colleagues are roasting someone over three letters. Bunch of fucking bullies if you ask me.

I could be mistaken, but it feels like your colleagues are not roasting someone but are taking offence at the tone of a message that whilst obviously written by someone, isn't actually from someone but is (or appears to be) an automated response.

Personally, if it was a human at the other end of a chat who started off with "Oof" I'd be fine with that as we're having dialogue, but when used as a generic automated message it would feel a little unprofessional. Not enough to complain about, but it would be noticed.

Nothing to do with bullies, personalities, or roasting someone. Quite the opposite in fact in that it is totally fine from humans - just not ideal from an automated system.

Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?

#206

Post by SixFive7 »

franciscop wrote: post #88

If you happen to be in the EU or if you qualify somehow, you could try submitting a GDPR request for all your data, which they are legally forced to respond or face steep fines.

As I am from the EU and both a business user as well as an individual customer with the same issue I did exactly that. They ignored me flat out multiple times. It was very rude. I got it on record though so we'll see how legal goes about it. Doesn't help me get to my data any faster though. ;-/

Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?

#207

Post by franciscop »

SixFive7 wrote: post #206
franciscop wrote: post #88

If you happen to be in the EU or if you qualify somehow, you could try submitting a GDPR request for all your data, which they are legally forced to respond or face steep fines.

As I am from the EU and both a business user as well as an individual customer with the same issue I did exactly that. They ignored me flat out multiple times. It was very rude. I got it on record though so we'll see how legal goes about it. Doesn't help me get to my data any faster though. ;-/

It should be fairly easy to follow up:

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/legal-rights/per...

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