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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?

#131

Post by gostsamo »

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…

Can we have a "Report HN" feature which allows people to open tickets to popular services which don't have proper support or are unwilling to solve the most pressing issues of their clients?

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

#132

Post by rukuu001 »

ceocoder wrote: post #77

T-10 before founder shows up here and says something like, “I’m sorry that you feel this way, I’m going to personally fix this”. That will not go well. After about, say 5/6 hours of “reflection”, “soul searching”, “meditation” - they’ll offer a better non apology. Finally a day later, “we screwed up, we broke your trust and we own it”.

T-35 or so :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27613632

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

#133

Post by neitherboosh »

freedomben wrote: post #70
sebmellen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, if there’s one thing I hate it’s that condescending millennial speak to cover up a serious issue. > Oof, so sorry about this... What??? If your company is broken don’t make it seem like a funny “aw shucks” blunder.

Interesting, I've written stuff very much like that before for customers that were hitting bugs. I wasn't trying to be "aw shucks" funny. I legitimately feel sorry that my shitty software was breaking on them. That they provided a workaround seemed like a nice thing to me. In fact that whole message seemed pretty good to me. It's probably not entirely that employee's fault but they're still trying to empathize and he…

This is also more or less how I talk to other engineers when they find bugs I’ve written :)

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

#134

Post by edgeform »

ghayes wrote: post #33
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6

I'm not a Notion customer, but frankly with a response like this I would never, ever be one. It's one thing to make a new feature request and have the response be "sorry, we'll get to it when we get to it." It's quite another to have a bug in an advertised, previously working feature, with no workaround, and say "sorry, our engineers have a big backlog." Imagine if a bank said "sorry, we know the withdrawal feature t…

I recently closed a bank account (due to Simple being acquired and the debacle of BBVA and now PNC) and it was quite difficult. I just wanted a "you send me a check with my remaining balance and we're done," and instead they told me I needed to withdraw my cash to zero (with limits that would have taken months), and only then could I close my account. Eventually, I was told a workaround where I could "Bill Pay" my ow…

> withdraw my cash to zero

> workaround where I could "Bill Pay" my own credit card

I'm confused on this. When you closed your Simple/BBVA account, did you not have any other checking account to transfer your funds into? Both of these suggestions will drain your account, but neither is the immediately obvious method of simply transferring your money to another checking or savings account.

I closed my account prior to the full BBVA transition, moving to Chime (heartily recommend in concert with YNAB for you folks that miss Simple's savings tools) and had no problem connecting my Chime account and transferring the funds via usual ACH transfer.

Simple was a real bank, backed by BBVA (and before that, Bancorp -- truly Simple's heyday in my opinion) and thus subject to typical banking rules. You could initiate ACH transfers with your Simple account like you could at your local credit union or bank.

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

#135

Post by pmontra »

josephg wrote: post #23

This is truly awful, and honestly shouldn't surprise anyone given the modern cloud approach to software. I've been thinking a lot lately about ownership. If I have a book, I can interact with it the way the publisher expects (I can read it). But being a physical object, I can also do lots of other things with my book. I can burn it. I can give it to a friend. I can sell it. I can draw in it. I can rip it up and use i…

In the case of GitHub and any other similar service the lockin is the number of services they added to the plain repository. Pull requests, issues, wiki, API for third party services, etc. You get back some of them if you self host with GitLab but every service supports GitHub, maybe not GitLab.

In this case, I don't even know what they get when they export from Notion but how are they going to collaborate on those data?

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

#136

Post by 8589934591 »

Fwiw, this has been an issue from last year. My wife has been having the same problem with her notebooks. This is the same for both her company data and her personal data. I'm sorry you and others have to go through with this, just wanted to highlight this isn't a new issue.

She has now migrated all her personal notebooks to emacs orgmode and her company notebooks to gcloud/docs and MD files.

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

#137

Post by caconym_ »

sylens wrote: post #50

I started using Notion last year and became increasingly uneasy about how little control I had over the notes and data I was entering into it. I switched over to Obsidian since then, which keeps my markdown files in folders on my local machine which I can then sync myself using OneDrive or something similar. You can also pay like $4/month for Obsidian to sync it for you, but you still retain copies locally.

Whoa, Obsidian looks awesome. Thanks for the tip, I'm trying it now and it looks like everything I've been wishing for.

Required proprietary cloud is a hard no for me. In today's world of crazy feature churn and products being abandoned if they don't have massive growth and/or millions of users, I don't see why anybody would rely on a tool that doesn't even give them free access to their own data, let alone a binary (or physical product) that will keep working even after support ends.

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

#138

Post by bostonsre »

tw04 wrote: post #122
hluska wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m obviously in the minority here but I appreciate that kind of tone. Yeah, it sucks that I’ve found a bug but the vast majority of the time, the devs involved hate the bug more than I do. I think the best way to handle support is to be yourself.

Unless you have a personal relationship with the person on the other end (like a customer you have been helping for years and are on a first name basis with), the best way to handle support is to be overly professional. Casual is almost always a recipe for disaster if the person on the other end doesn't know you. It makes it sound like you aren't taking their issue seriously.

How does a support rep being friendly and casual lead to a disaster? Or are the disasters you are referring to purely caused by the customer acting entitled and screaming because they got offended that someone was trying to be nice to them?

It's more than likely some dude that is just starting their career that has almost no training that is trying to the best of their ability to express empathy, provide a workaround, and make the customer happy. He doesn't control what gets fixed. Why do business interactions need to be devoid of social niceties? It's some software company, not a morgue.

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

naikrovek wrote: post #94
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the hell is "Oof, we're so sorry about this." remotely similar to "uwu we'we sowwy dis isn't wewking anymowe.. pwease don't be angwy wiff us" I get it, some forms of communication aren't your bag. But I think it's at least reasonable to focus on a company's intent even if the verbiage isn't what you'd prefer. FWIW I'm quite older than a millennial, but I didn't find anything infantilizing about Notion's response…

it's insulting because it is attempting to minimize the customer's stake in the problem by appearing to be concerned and empathetic. if they were concerned or empathetic, the issue would not have lasted as long as it has. in short, it's disingenuous and it's an attempt to minimize the customer's concerns.

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by ncphil »

Some here have advocated taking legal action, although I wonder if they bothered to read Notion's terms and conditions beforehand (https://www.notion.so/Terms-Conditions-4e1c5dd3e3de45dfa4a8e...). There's a lot in there that a lawyer might find... troublesome. Like most software service agreements, it's pretty one-sided in favor of the vendor with the usual kitchen sink disclaimers and arbitration provisions.

I think you've actually made a good start by posting here on HN. As someone else wrote, going on other social media could also help. You could also file a complaint with the California Department of Consumer Affairs (whose contact info is helpfully provided in the terms). If you're a US resident you might also reach out to your local member of Congress. Many Congressional constituent services people can work wonders in cases like this.

Of course those are all the hammer. Another approach, if you've got the technical skills or willing to pay for them, is to look into writing something to leverage their API to extract your data -- although their terms prohibit spidering or scraping that's technically not the same as invoking an API. Depending on the real value of the data involved, it would probably be worth consulting a lawyer who does IP work _before_ you do any serious queries.

Did I mention that you should probably talk to a lawyer?

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