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Notion for everyone

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Re: Notion for everyone

#41

Post by ebg13 »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #12
ebg13 wrote: post #9

Earlier 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…

> Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor?

Yes. I don't know why you're getting such convoluted answers from others.

Re: Notion for everyone

#42

Post by txcwpalpha »

edjrage wrote: post #33
txcwpalpha wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uhh... Have you tried reading past that? They literally list pretty much all of the most important features right there (though I believe not all of them). They even show which services each feature replaces. It's true there is marketing speak sprinkled throughout it, but all in all it's the opposite of the "nothing but marketing speak" trend most services follow.

Yes. Here are some excerpts from the (very minimally descriptive) page:

> Write better. Think more clearly. Get organized.

Totally useless in terms of explaining what the product is.

>A simple, beautiful writing experience, with 30+ types of content to add.

Great, so I can... write things in it? What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.

> Turn your tribal knowledge into easy-to-find answers.

How does it do this? No explanation given.

> Kanban boards, tables, lists, and more.

"and more"? And more what? This is what I'm trying to get information on.

> Lightweight and flexible.

Flexible how? This phrase is meaningless to me.

This is one of the more marketing speak ridden websites I've encountered.

If someone made a post on HN asking people to compare and contrast, say, AWS vs Azure, would your response be "just go read the AWS website duh"?

Take a look at the other comments in this thread and ask yourself if the Notion website conveys even half of the insight that the other commenters have provided. Those comments are the entire point of HN, not "just go read the website".

Re: Notion for everyone

#43

Post by fastball »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #39
fastball wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supernotes[1] has been called "a smaller, faster notion" and supports LaTeX (both inline and block, notion only does block) and code highlighting. Disclaimer: I built it. 1: https://supernotes.app

... You have a cookie pop-up that says, "Can we use cookies?" but the only option is a "Yes" button. If you're not giving people a choice, why even pretend?

Tracking scripts / cookies are only loaded if you click "Yes", otherwise they are not loaded at all.

Re: Notion for everyone

#44

Post by Oarch »

jotson wrote: post #11
txcwpalpha wrote: post #7

Anyone 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…

It's a nice wiki with some interesting database features (a la airtable). Writing in it is pretty nice because it's basically markdown. I'd stopped using it because it was too easy to outgrow the free plan. Now with unlimited pages I'll give it another shot but I'm still not sold on its benefits vs storing all my notes locally in plain markdown files.

I'd also recommend Gitbook. They've improved their search features recently and I'd say they're on a similar level to Notion.

We used it for our company wiki. Wanted to use Notion but for 500 users the Notion quote came out 15x more expensive so it was a no-brainer!

Re: Notion for everyone

#45

Post by _fzslm »

franky47 wrote: post #23

The 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.…

this is the only thing that stops me from using Notion, too. just downloaded it and it looks like it would change my life... except i don't own the data.

right now i'm trying out Outline [1] which has an option for self hosting.

[1] https://github.com/outline/outline

Re: Notion for everyone

#46

Post by drukenemo »

chc4 wrote: post #35
Benmcdonald__ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no easy way to implement client side encryption. You will have a private key or long password the you will keep safe. You lose that all your data in gone. Plus it's difficult to securely move that password to a new platform

Your data being inaccessible without a private key or password is the entire point.

Exactly. I cannot understand how this can’t be the user’s choice.

Re: Notion for everyone

#47

Post by csallen »

nojito wrote: post #25

Notion is the embodiment of busy work --> false sense of being productive.

Notion's just a tool, like a pen and a pad. If you decide to use it for nothing but busy work, that's an option I suppose. But I get a lot of real work done using Notion.

Re: Notion for everyone

#48

Post by ponker »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #12
ebg13 wrote: post #9

Earlier 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…

Notion is basically an app framework with a standardized UI surface and a couple of apps built in. So it’s not surprising that your friend is using it for almost anything the same way you can use Ruby on Rails to build anything.

Re: Notion for everyone

#49

Post by pcx »

I love using Notion, but I think the general discussion about it does not talk enough about how it's flexibility is also a problem many times.

1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello

2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to manually maintain it

3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly.

But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.

Re: Notion for everyone

#50

Post by drukenemo »

Benmcdonald__ wrote: post #32
franky47 wrote: post #23

The 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.…

There is no easy way to implement client side encryption. You will have a private key or long password the you will keep safe. You lose that all your data in gone. Plus it's difficult to securely move that password to a new platform

Much more critical (imo) software such as Backblaze offers full encryption, it’s the user choice and responsibility. That’s what privacy is also about.
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