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Notion's mid-life crisis

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Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#101

Post by 015a »

threeseed wrote: post #56
Aurornis wrote: post #50

I enjoyed Notion at first for certain tasks, but it became much less enjoyable as everyone tried to force everything into emoji-laden Notion docs. The Notion spaces used by the Product and Program managers I worked with in the past few years have become a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date, hard to find, and often superseded by some new Notion page they created but forgot to tell us abo…

> A tool that tries to be everything to everyone Jira doesn't try to be everything. It's a project management app. It does nothing else. Notion is wiki, CRM, project management, calendar etc.

Its kind of funny that you'd list four features of notion, three of which people absolutely do regularly and normally use Jira for (e.g. https://support.atlassian.com/jira-work-management/docs/use-...).

The 4th, a Wiki, is of course more-so just Confluence, but I have seen echoes of a wiki make their way into Jira; e.g. in one place I worked, every release was a ticket that was duplicated from a previous ticket, and that ticket had step-by-step instructions on how to run different parts of the release.

You're just wrong on this, bro. Notion tries to be everything to everyone. Jira is everything to everyone, it doesn't matter what it tries to be.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#102

Post by lmm »

karakanb wrote: post #43

It still blows my mind that Google Docs still haven't taken over Notion's business altogether. I have used Notion for ~6 months for my own company, ended up going back to Google Docs because it was not worth it. I am sure there are a billion other uses of it, we weren't using any of its database-like features, just as an internal documentation platform, but still fascinating to see a business thrive on the lack of in…

> Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users.

Technically they can. Organisationally they can't.

> I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.

You won't though, or at best you'll make a rough-and-ready version that works for you. Polished stuff doesn't get created without a business model, and you can't make a business model out of a browser extension that messes with a third-party site, not these days anyway.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#103

Post by lmm »

anonygler wrote: post #22

Notions kinda funny. It has this stickiness among a college aged, tech savvy demographic that’s not generating any revenue for them but has garnered a massive valuation relative to their revenue. They want business from me, a tech savvy technical leader in an enterprise who mostly doesn’t care about what they offer. I want all my docs to live in Git, the way it does in Google’s g3doc. We use Notion and, while it seem…

They have no value-add for developer-only documentation that exists in Git. Most of the value of Notion comes from it being usable by non-developers (but still tolerable for developers).

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#104

Post by jazzyjackson »

luckman212 wrote: post #84
iforgotmysocks wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Notes is underrated. There is no flashy features to distract you. Just you and your notes.

I strongly disagree for these reasons: - note data stored in a proprietary format - no way to access note data from other apps/api - no way to export in bulk, or in any other format than PDF (a terrible format for notes) - iCloud sync is a mildly terrifying thing to entrust important data to I use Apple Notes for the occasional quick grocery list but that's about it.

If you sync your notes to icloud you can bulk export to flat text files via https://privacy.apple.com/ > "request a copy of your data"

I've never experienced data loss due to icloud sync YMMV

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#105

Post by 015a »

luckman212 wrote: post #84
iforgotmysocks wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Notes is underrated. There is no flashy features to distract you. Just you and your notes.

I strongly disagree for these reasons: - note data stored in a proprietary format - no way to access note data from other apps/api - no way to export in bulk, or in any other format than PDF (a terrible format for notes) - iCloud sync is a mildly terrifying thing to entrust important data to I use Apple Notes for the occasional quick grocery list but that's about it.

I don't get the "note data is stored in a proprietary format" hate. There's a dozen different open source tools you can find which will one-shot export your Apple Notes to markdown, when you want to leave the ecosystem. Its not like Notion where the exports are messy, non-bulk, and destructive; they're proprietary, but parseable and sitting in a file on your MacOS filesystem.

I've never had iCloud Sync display any weird behavior in Apple Notes, and I've got thousands in there. I have, absolutely, seen Obsidian Sync delete notes I did not delete, and fail to upload notes; both of these were generally remediable via their recycle bin, but still very concerning.

All of these complaints are of the nature of "I don't actually have anything valuable to write down so I'd rather worry about the nature of the tool than what I'm writing". And, to be clear, I think this is why Notion is so popular, just for different reasons than your's; it looks great, and makes you feel productive because you've got amazing cross-referenced tables and hyperbacklinks and h1h2h3s and then wait where's the content?

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#106

Post by DavidPiper »

easeout wrote: post #79
iforgotmysocks wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Notes is underrated. There is no flashy features to distract you. Just you and your notes.

You say that, but there are tons of features in Notes. They're just successfully kept out of your way until you go looking for them, so when you just want a note that's what you get. This is progressive disclosure, a longtime tenet of Apple GUI design. A relevant and somewhat meta example: This year they added disclosable sections, which were previously a differentiator for Notion. That's in addition to handwriting s…

I'm in the process of moving all (~2000) of my Apple Notes to Logseq. I still think Apple Notes is excellent, and I'll still be using it for Inbox-style notes.

But it just needs to be a bit more open and extendable. Give me good tables, proper linking between notes and a graph view (or at least an API so I can build that myself) and I'll be back forever.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#107

Post by personjerry »

luckman212 wrote: post #84
iforgotmysocks wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Notes is underrated. There is no flashy features to distract you. Just you and your notes.

I strongly disagree for these reasons: - note data stored in a proprietary format - no way to access note data from other apps/api - no way to export in bulk, or in any other format than PDF (a terrible format for notes) - iCloud sync is a mildly terrifying thing to entrust important data to I use Apple Notes for the occasional quick grocery list but that's about it.

There's ways to export the notes btw, for example https://github.com/storizzi/notes-exporter

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#108

Post by paulddraper »

Supermancho wrote: post #97
threeseed wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A tool that tries to be everything to everyone Jira doesn't try to be everything. It's a project management app. It does nothing else. Notion is wiki, CRM, project management, calendar etc.

> It's a project management app. It does nothing else. I would say it doesn't do that very well. You can't manage projects without mapping out dependencies, visually and with integrated relationship tracking. JIRA is miserable at this.

It's an issue tracker, with some project management/agile bolted on

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#109

Post by refulgentis »

charlie0 wrote: post #34
epiccoleman wrote: post #11

I like Notion but I share the sense that it's not really targeted at my use case anymore. I think I could essentially move everything into Obsidian and lose almost nothing in the process. I just use it for taking notes and writing stuff down. I like how easy it is to drop an image, video, or document into a notion page, but I've only barely used features like databases which seem to be the big selling point, and none…

So far, the only weakness I've found with Obsidian are the tables. Someone needs to build in a killer tables feature. Obsidian is an Electron app; it shouldn't be too hard to build a stripped down version of Google Sheets.

> it shouldn't be too hard to build a stripped down version of Google Sheets.

HN, never change.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#110

Post by anh690136 »

I started as a Notion user, but then it gets complicated and overwhelming quickly. It can be a good database and beautiful system, but for individual use cases, it’s too much for ADHD. I tried to use Apple Notes and Docs from then, but with too many notes, insights get buried and cannot be found easily. So I built an AI note app called saner.ai since & it worked better for me at least.
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