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Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

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Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you try to sign up for a new account? Similar level of malfunction, I assume. I am so sick of this reality. Endless dark patterns to get your money. Nearly impossible to get out. Why ever make a good product when you can just seek rent and fall into that perfect optimum of cheap-enough that cancelling is not worth the pain.

Assume away, but to play devil's advocate, how much testing do you think is done on the close account procedures vs add new account and accept money from that account? i'll bet it's not even close to being even

I don’t accept that. If those procedures are failing, then someone should be getting 5xx alerts. Before they started failing, unit and integration tests should’ve been raising alarms.

A site that remains persistently broken has a lot more wrong with it than just some software bugs.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#34
Personal journey: I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but encountered a bug that the developers were not keen on fixing promptly. It was then that I realized the importance of personal notes surviving beyond companies, apps, and formats. Quickly after, I switched to a collection of plain text files using org-mode markdown and have been happy ever since.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#35
I remember when Evernote launched and everyone was super hyped about it -- even some of the biggest VC names promoted them. Not to mention the funding they raised ($290M). It was literally iOS Notes on steroids. I even used it for awhile, but somehow it didn't stick.

They hired bunch of great people and had some good backend tech -- sad to see this happen to them.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#36
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you try to sign up for a new account? Similar level of malfunction, I assume. I am so sick of this reality. Endless dark patterns to get your money. Nearly impossible to get out. Why ever make a good product when you can just seek rent and fall into that perfect optimum of cheap-enough that cancelling is not worth the pain.

There have been stories of how convoluted and practically impossible the unsubscribe process from Amazon Prime is. At almost every step, the system sort of nags you with "Do you REALLY want to do this?" almost with a trolling attitude! If this is the case with proper big tech capitalist, think what will the scenario be with smaller pleb capitalists like Evernote in this grave recession.

There's at most like three do you really want to dialogs to cancel prime. I do a month every so often and the cancellation works reliably. It's bad yeah but not anywhere as bad as the site just not allowing you to cancel.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#37
post #5

The new features will be feeding everyone's notes into an LLM and then screaming "AI!" at the top of their lungs to investors.

You can already do this with Evernote in fact, it’s called “AI cleanup”. It’s not that good now but I like the idea of having an AI format everything cleanly

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#38
I use Obsidian for note-taking, but Evernote for my "digital shoebox" of receipts, PDFs, photos of wine labels, insurance statements, etc. They are all quickly findable through a combination of OCR and tags.

Does anyone have a good alternative for this use-case?

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#40

They lost the plot when they suddenly reduced the number of devices for the free tier. There was a time when iCloud wasn't reliable. When that improved, Notes became a simpler free alternative.

For anyone who may not be aware, Apple Notes can import Evernote .enex files. The process was mostly painless, and I’m glad to be rid of the Evernote dependency. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205793

While I happily sing and prance in Apple’s “Walled Garden” and have done so for over a decade, I feel uneasy about putting all of my notes in Notes with no easy export option.
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