It's nice but I don't think my 2016 MBP can handle another electron on top of slack, VS code, Node, and chrome all at the same time.
Notion for everyone
21–30 of 468 posts
Re: Notion for everyone
#22Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion? I have a friend that works at a small company who is absolutely nuts about it (every single one of his tweets is about it), but I also have seen other people say it's a convoluted mess once you get above a certain size and they regret ever going down that path. Also curious if anyone has comments on how it compares to similar apps like Dropbox…
Notion gives you a number of options for structuring data (tables, datatypes, formatting) and collaborating (great comment/tagging system + nice doc hierarchy). As a builder I have to say that it's a really nice product. The interaction design is extremely good, but.....
IMO the biggest issue with these sorts of better-mousetrap documents/business tools is that they add another application to your organization. They're almost all slightly better than Confluence/GSuite (and I say that as a GSuite fan), but my team already runs our SSO/Email etc through GSuite and our issue tracking through Jira. Even with better functionality, maintaining another tool can turn the value proposition negative for scaling companies due to time spent on enablement, vendor negotiation, change management, wrangling of docs, security, etc.
Of course, these products like to sell/market via guerrilla, bottoms-up strategies propelled by their great design and natural appeal: the people introducing them to organizations are typically insulated from the negative logistical externalities. This allows them to dodge a top-down procurement process that would have much higher requirements. There's a whole organizational question of whether it's best for your company to accept new bottoms-up tools that incrementally improve efficiency, or accepting "worse" tools that simplify the overall logistics of running a team.
Fwiw my team also used Dropbox Paper in the early days of the product, and the story then was quite similar to Notion (we weren't customers of Dropbox's storage product).
Re: Notion for everyone
#23The one thing that bothers me about Notion (and Slack and other "everything in one place" tools), is the lack of encryption. I might have FAANGophobia, but whenever there is a free tier without a form of end-to-end encryption in place, it feels like a data puddle waiting to become a lake.
That being said, having clear-text data would allow features like an API on publicly shared pages/blocks, to use Notion as a CMS. I have seen some attempts [1] at reverse-engineering their internal API, but an official one on a paid plan could be a nice addition.
Re: Notion for everyone
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion? Have you ever used Confluence? If not, have you ever used any Atlassian products? Atlassian is all over corp structures, and everything they make is painful to use without a training course or the desire to immerse yourself in boring-as-shit documentation. A lot of corps jumping onto Notion are jumping off of Confluence.
>Have you ever used Confluence? Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor? I guess I'm struggling to understand it because my aforementioned friend talks about how he uses Notion for basically every possible use case under the sun (probably even some where it's not meant for that but he found some way to finagle it). Based on that knowledge, I still don't really know what Notion is meant for other than being just-anothe…
I really don't mean to be rude, but why don't you just read their homepage (and the one posted here)? It should answer most of your questions. (Hint: It really is _way_ more than "just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics".)
Re: Notion for everyone
#25Notion is the embodiment of busy work --> false sense of being productive.
Re: Notion for everyone
#26This is kinda weird, because I was happily giving them $4/month after running out of space in their trial plan, and now I absolutely have no reason to keep giving them money. Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my usage of their app doesn't align with their business m…
I too was happily paying for my personal plan.
Recently they have been hiring aggressively and expanding their templates for specific use cases. Coming from a cynical HN perspective, this looks like another promising startup falling into the vicious cycle of using VC money to fund hyper growth.
However their founder Ivan Zhao has been outspoken about not taking more VC money than necessary, and creating sustainable growth. So for now I'm approaching this news with cautious optimism.
Re: Notion for everyone
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion? Have you ever used Confluence? If not, have you ever used any Atlassian products? Atlassian is all over corp structures, and everything they make is painful to use without a training course or the desire to immerse yourself in boring-as-shit documentation. A lot of corps jumping onto Notion are jumping off of Confluence.
>Have you ever used Confluence? Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor? I guess I'm struggling to understand it because my aforementioned friend talks about how he uses Notion for basically every possible use case under the sun (probably even some where it's not meant for that but he found some way to finagle it). Based on that knowledge, I still don't really know what Notion is meant for other than being just-anothe…
I don't think it's especially great at note taking. I'd prefer a different directory structure for that.
The love for it makes more sense if you think of it as a really simple website builder. You can have a database of pages with structured data, unstructured data, and nice layout. That sounds simple, but it covers a lot of use cases.
If you check out communities talking about Notion, you'll see the layout stuff is huge. You might even think it's overboard, to the point of productivity porn. But if you're the kind of person who cares about that (think the girl in middle school who took notes with 6 colored pens) or you want to make something pleasing to use for a tiny organization, you can end up falling in love with it.
Re: Notion for everyone
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Have you ever used Confluence? Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor? I guess I'm struggling to understand it because my aforementioned friend talks about how he uses Notion for basically every possible use case under the sun (probably even some where it's not meant for that but he found some way to finagle it). Based on that knowledge, I still don't really know what Notion is meant for other than being just-anothe…
I really don't mean to be rude, but why don't you just read their homepage (and the one posted here)? It should answer most of your questions. (Hint: It really is _way_ more than "just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics".) https://www.notion.so/
Because I have read their homepage (multiple times) and I find it to be nothing more than marketing speak that doesn't actually explain what it does or what it's good for, nor does it convey actual human experience using the product (which HN is excellent at discussing).
"With Notion, all your work is in one place" is a terrible descriptor of a product.
Re: Notion for everyone
#29This is kinda weird, because I was happily giving them $4/month after running out of space in their trial plan, and now I absolutely have no reason to keep giving them money. Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my usage of their app doesn't align with their business m…
I too was happily paying for my personal plan. Recently they have been hiring aggressively and expanding their templates for specific use cases. Coming from a cynical HN perspective, this looks like another promising startup falling into the vicious cycle of using VC money to fund hyper growth. However their founder Ivan Zhao has been outspoken about not taking more VC money than necessary, and creating sustainable g…
Knowing their aversion to VC in their history, I had the opposite reaction — this feels like a play to boost raw user count in order to attract an investor.
Re: Notion for everyone
#30I know it's a niche need but any note-taking app I use needs to support Latex and code highlighting. Unfortunately, once I throw this criteria in just about every app gets excluded, but at least VSC + sync is still very nice.
https://tiddlywiki.com/plugins/tiddlywiki/katex/
https://tiddlywiki.com/plugins/tiddlywiki/highlight/
[my setup is just markdown, really, but it's here](https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-to-t...)