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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?

#171

Post by edgeform »

true_religion wrote: post #157
edgeform wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something doesn't add up in the story here. It seems like they suggested every other way in the book to withdraw funds other than a regular ACH transfer.

It seems like the guy doesn't want to have a bank account anymore. If he just is moving to a different bank, then all he has to do is make a ACH transfer. Also, the Bank may have a reporting requirement for over 10k withdrawals in cash but they will let you take even more than that in cash if you want to. You may have to work it out with them to get enough money on site at the branch if you have hundreds of thousands…

Yeah, if he doesn't want a bank account anymore yet has thousands of dollars in there ... not sure what he's expecting here, or why he's blaming Simple/BBVA specifically for a predicament of his own creation. He complains about "days" of limits for withdrawals, so we're left to believe this is at least mid four figures or higher in balance.

At the time, he may have had issue with walking into a "branch" of Simple. While BBVA was the parent bank for Simple, their branches had zero insight into Simple bank accounts. When the transition happened, BBVA branches were getting hit hard by Simple customers expecting sudden service. However as far as the BBVA branches were concerned officially those customers weren't theirs -- no BBVA account number, just Simple, which they never had insight to when it did exist.

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

#172

Post by edgeform »

jmstfv wrote: post #170

This is something that has been worrying me for quite some time. Considering how many folks use Notion as a knowledge base for their personal and professional lives, I'm sure others feel the same. Since their API is in public beta, I'm building a tool to back up and restore your Notion data to a storage provider of your choice: https://notionbackups.com

Did you really just whip up a placeholder site because of a Ask HN post?

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

#173

Post by jmstfv »

edgeform wrote: post #172
jmstfv wrote: post #170

This is something that has been worrying me for quite some time. Considering how many folks use Notion as a knowledge base for their personal and professional lives, I'm sure others feel the same. Since their API is in public beta, I'm building a tool to back up and restore your Notion data to a storage provider of your choice: https://notionbackups.com

Did you really just whip up a placeholder site because of a Ask HN post?

No.

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

#174

Post by prower »

hluska wrote: post #160
bostonsre wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but again, it's not 911, it's a software company. The user's company is not gonna go bankrupt, they can still use the application. It is a front line support rep, it is the same as some guy at McDonald's. Yes, I think people are entitled when they feel they have a right to be mean or difficult to some person who is just trying to do their job and is making a plausible attempt to be nice to you. You can't read…

This thread has really messed with my feelings on the tech industry. When did we all become unfeeling automatons? Did I miss that memo?? There’s nothing wrong with expressing anguish. And I happily fire customers who have a problem with that. Life is too short to deal with that level of entitlement.

I've learned that good intentions are filtered differently when the other party is already angry.

If my customer is having a problem, I can try being friendly after the communication is already ongoing, problem has been aknowledged, and it is on his way to be fixed. Ending in a friendly tone is a big plus. Starting with it, not at all.

On the other hand, as a customer, having to deal with you at all is already stressful enough, i'm paying you and still losing time over your screw-ups, and still you start with an "ooof". It would give me a feeling of "not only i'm losing time, i'm also being joked on".

Being professional and gradually friendly is simply the most secure way to operate, because every person that contacts you for a problem, big or small, doesn't want to contact you to begin with. Don't "ooof" me please.

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

#175

Post by gostsamo »

hluska wrote: post #163
gostsamo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't try to be funny in your docs. If you want to convey information, make it clean, precise, and to the point. Do not assume and do not distract. Please. P.S. Jokes are not totally forbidden, but they should be more subtle and not so intrusive as "You are asking me a question, but here I'll give you a performance instead of an answer".

Yes, the word ‘oof’ denotes a performance. The etymology dates back to early vaudeville days when Barker Malarkey used it to start the Famous Malarkey Family’s drag show… Except that’s not true. That whole paragraph is a load of malarkey. It’s a word. You don’t know the person involved and you’re making more awful assumptions based upon three letters.

Now, reverse it backward. Not only I don't know them, but neither they know me. Can you see the issue now?

There is such a thing as technical writing style and it is about the relevance of information pieces and the relations between them.

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

#176

Post by Xunjin »

pm90 wrote: post #90
Xunjin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed you have a great point here, as I can simplify, you do not own your data, you buy allocation of certain service, like you said about Amazon ebooks. Indeed I'm a guy who balances more between freedom instead of making it rigidly by laws, however the "Tech World" really needs "foundational directives" where all companies should abide. Like John Locke defines, as I remember, that you have a "natural right" to Lif…

The industry isn't collaborative enough to voluntarily come up with such practices so the most likely avenue seems to be through laws and regulations.

Indeed the problem is how to make an international law which they could abide?!

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

#177

Post by ryan-duve »

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”.

I got the impression from your comment that you disapprove of the above scenario, when to me it seems ideal. If I interpreted that right, could you help me understand why the above is bad?

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

#178

Post by nojvek »

I've had this idea in my head to make a notion-like editor which uses Git/GH as it's store of data. When you save, it makes a commit.

Everything is saved as flat json files and image/data blobs.

Seeing this comment, is further solidifying the idea. Notion is a great editor, but having little control over data isn't great.

User should be able to control where the data lives. And when they want it gone, it should be gone. Poof!

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

#179

Post by ___luigi »

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…

We were thinking to switch to using Notion for a sizable project, but this thread changed our mind. It is, indeed, frustrating.

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

#180

Post by steve_adams_86 »

This is an "old" thread now, but something that stands out to me here is how damaging things like this must be for Notion's ability and opportunities to recruit developers.

I interviewed with them years ago after sharing a lot of feedback and bug reports in their early years. I was PUMPED about this space and really wanted to help make something like Notion awesome. I wanted it to work for me, I wanted it to work for others, and I knew there would be tons to learn in the space. But my impression of Notion (not their devs specifically) left me feeling like it wouldn't happen there, and I just abandoned the process. This happened with Slite, too.

But it's stuff like this which lead me to believe I shouldn't work on those teams. As a dev, I probably can't fix that the company overwhelmingly doesn't care enough about making an important feature work.

I noticed a keen interest in my ideas about which features me or my team needed, or how existing features could expand to meet our needs, but not much interest in fixing bugs or limitations. Now we're here, and the export feature doesn't work while the company continues to move forward with other things.

I can't help but think this sort of outward appearance has a negative affect on how easily they can hire, and who they can hire. This sort of things is a nail in the coffin for me - I don't want to work somewhere where we deploy day after day after day knowing that things are effectively broken.

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