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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

#71

Post by goldpizza44 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #24
Douger wrote: post #11

For the last 5 days I have been actively trying to cancel my Evernote personal plan. The site would break every time I navigated to manage my subscription or try and reach support. I guess that's one way to reduce customer churn.

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.

This is what virtual Credit Cards are for... Each site gets a separate number and I can expire them as needed. Unfortunately, if they get popular vendors will figure out a way to detect and refuse.

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

#72

Post by guiambros »

echelon wrote: post #10
yuppie_scum wrote: post #2

I just copy pasted all my notes into Obsidian, which doesn’t constantly nag me to subscribe

I really love Obsidian, I still have some major blockers. The git plugin is dangerously broken. I've had pushes from different computers overwrite one another. It doesn't show merge conflicts - it's happy to plow forward. I've reduced my usage since that happened. This is a huge problem. I need to have confidence the backups and merges aren't destroying notes. There's no easy way to open multiple workspaces simultane…

Genuinely curious: what's the problem you're trying to solve with Git plugin that the official Obsidian Sync [1] doesn't solve natively (besides cost)?

I've been using Obsidian Sync for a year, and it works flawlessly for my use case. Is syncs not only notes, but also configuration, plugins, allows creation of multiple vaults, works on mobile, fine-grained control over which folders to sync in each device, and even allow controlled sharing with collaborators. Oh, and full encryption with user-provided key, which is a must. All for $96/year.

[1] https://obsidian.md/sync

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

#73

Post by fastball »

Here is an (incomplete) list[1] of random note-taking apps that you can try if you are leaving Evernotes.

Or you can try ours, which is based on Markdown (not open source) and a nested notecard format (not documents). Heavy emphasis on getting out of your way and just letting you write notes, though still with plenty of power if you need it. It has plenty of other cool features[2] and we're prepping for a pretty big 3.0 release in the very near future which should be exciting.

Yes, this is a very shameless plug. But in the spirit of Threads capitalizing on the upheaval at Twitter, I suppose I can do the same for Evernote.

[1] https://supernotes.app/alternatives/

[2] https://supernotes.app/features/

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

#74

Post by lb4r »

OriginalPenguin wrote: post #57
lb4r wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing the same for the past few years, but have yet to figure out a good way to sync things between my devices. Not that it bothers me too much, but sometimes I'd like to have that convenience.

Git? Syncthing?

I do use Git for source control-purposes, but this is the first time I hear of Syncthing. Would that allow for completely automated and frictionless syncing?

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

#75

Post by dylan604 »

kstrauser wrote: post #32
dylan604 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because a 5xx alert is sent doesn't mean that someone will do anything about it, even if they didn't just lay off the entire staff. I'm sure some PM triaged the 5xx notices and anything coming from close account just gets pushed to the bottom of the queue. Obviously, I have no knowledge if that's what actually happened. I'm just continuing the advocacy of the devil

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

#76

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

pyeri wrote: post #29
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #24

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.

Is it different in different jurisdictions? I get 1 month of Prime at a time and cancel all the time.

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

#77

Post by swayson »

Obsidian.md for the win. I used to use evernote way back when they started, was cool software, then they started scaling and added worst search UI I have ever come across. That day, I deleted my account and went markdown with my own storage. Don't see the benefit of why your notes should be controlled by others.

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

#78

Post by ycombinete »

wkat4242 wrote: post #52
timetraveller26 wrote: post #4

And to think that at one point Evernote was THE note taking app. So much wasted potential.

Yeah and now we only really have OneNote, the web version of which still really sucks. You can't even search a whole notebook, just a section. And it needs to reload every day.

OneNote 2016 was revolutionary for me. Since then I’ve found it less and less usable with each new update.

I think the tension between having a good web app and a good desktop app with the same interface is difficult to resolve.

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

#79

Post by belthesar »

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did.

Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feeling like what they had was being taken away from them spurned a lack of trust. Obsidian made the smartest play by giving you the editor, keeping the files outside of a database so that they're portable (so they feel safe if they ever have to move away), and telling you that if you want to own the sync story that you can, but you can pay to have the cohesive experience on every device.

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