Whenever I have to use Notion, I find it a waste of time compared to other tools :(
Why?
Notion's mid-life crisis
141–150 of 163 posts
Re: Notion's mid-life crisis
#142Notion was clearly made by people who do not use or understand keyboard shortcuts; you can't even properly select text without using the mouse. It's been somewhat maddening switching from Confluence.
I have the opposite complaint: you can't even reliably select text without also using the keyboard! Half the time I drag to select, it starts moving a block. Half the time I click to navigate, it starts a selection instead (as if I had not released the mouse from previous click). I need to press the Escape key and try again.
Notion to me is the prime example for "too much JavaScript". Opening a note in a tab take 10 seconds and interrupts me half the time with some random news or a prompt to try some AI feature.
Re: Notion's mid-life crisis
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 we…
Counterpoint, I have seen sync issues on very popular large note, cloud-based solutions that use proprietary formats - Evernote comes to mind.
When you have tens of thousands of notes, it's hard to even know if at some point, the note has been suddenly changed, reverted, or modified in a way that you didn't even realize occurred.
With an open format, specifically a text based one like Markdown, I can sync all my notes to a git repository in a diffable manner that I can quickly review.
Re: Notion's mid-life crisis
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I work at Notion but not on AI) There’s far more for Notion to lose “training customer data on AI” than for Notion to gain. Like if an AI feature ever disclosed private information of one customer to another, that would be a huge blow to the company. The closest thing to that that makes sense for us is building “learn to rank” style search models to improve search results, but this is not usually considered “AI” and…
For me, it seems that most of the notion users in my circle(very small one) are non-technical people. Even if your AI vomits some other user’s private data, it’ll be considered a glitch and will be forgiven because non-technical users does not panic or gets flame-baited because these are irrelevant to them. That being said, I appreciate that you understand the risk, and want to believe that the people on the helm of…
On the contrary if Notion were to regurgitate one company’s business development strategy notes to another company, that would be much worse than a technical documentation leak! In my experience non-technical data usually much more important to users than technical data, non-technical users are much less understanding, and our community keeps very close eye out for bugs, leaks, changes in privacy policy, etc.
Re: Notion's mid-life crisis
#145Not that I expect them to fix it at this point since it seems to be a known issue, but just in case anyone from Notion is watching please fix the macOS app’s CPU usage. On a brand new M3 MacBook Pro each tab takes about 10% of one core _non-stop_ even in the background. I have to constantly cull tabs or my machine becomes noticeably less responsive.
This was happening to me on an M1 until I realised it wasn't a Universal Binary and reinstalled the correct version.
Re: Notion's mid-life crisis
#146Another anecdote added to the "I don't get notion" pile. I just don't get notion. I use Apple Notes for everything id use notion for + scratch.txt on every project folder root. (i've used notion, quip, gdocs, dropbox paper) Notion lives rent free in my mind because while im indifferent to it, people seem to LOVE it. and that's so fascinating. even this article, I upvoted it because the conversation about notion is in…
Apple Notes is underrated. There is no flashy features to distract you. Just you and your notes.
I like Apple Notes, but collaborative editing is completely broken. I use it for sharing things like shopping lists with my wife. If I edit something while she's also editing, it gets mangled. Whatever Notes uses for collaborative syncing, it's not OT or CRDTs.
Notes is also quite terrible at many things:
* Embedded photos cannot be resized or placed next to text
* Table support is incredibly limited, to the point of being unusable except as a rudimentary grid
* No support for multiple columns
* No table of contents view
* No linking between notes (I think?)
* No way to change the font or change out the dreary yellow background colour
* No syntax highlighting of embedded code fragment
* No support for equations
* No support for shorthands (e.g. # to get a level 1 headline)
Notion, for all its flaws, has all of the above. And its collaborative editing is solid, if maybe not as good as Google Docs.
Re: Notion's mid-life crisis
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to use Notion daily. I switched to Anytype when Notion launched an AI tool that trains on your data. A bit more of a learning curve but that's an absolute no-go when a tool contains the inner workings of my brain. Plenty of comparable private options. Intellectual capital is rapidly being migrated from workers to shareholders under the guise of "AI". Imagine a world where C-suites no longer rely on or support…
(I work at Notion but not on AI) There’s far more for Notion to lose “training customer data on AI” than for Notion to gain. Like if an AI feature ever disclosed private information of one customer to another, that would be a huge blow to the company. The closest thing to that that makes sense for us is building “learn to rank” style search models to improve search results, but this is not usually considered “AI” and…
I appreciate the response but once you get investors and shareholders those concerns are worthless.
If it's possible, it will eventually happen.
Re: Notion's mid-life crisis
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I work at Notion but not on AI) We maintain a list of data su processors here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Notion-s-List-of-Subprocessors-... It’s not as specific as citing the actual model version in use from each vendor, though.
That isn't reassuring at all. It's pretty much the worst case scenario. I don't want my private notes sent to places like openai who will use them to train models and who don't have any reasonable corporate governance. They have leaked customer data before. And I'm not anti AI. I'm an ML researcher who uses LLMs all the time. But there's a big difference between that and revealing all my private information to them.
In their defense, in my phrasing, what is sent and to whom had equal weight. But you’re exactly right: obviously it is OpenAI and Anthropic. The private content being sent is the important part.
Re: Notion's mid-life crisis
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
people also use jira as a support ticket system. Sprint planning system. Kanban system. I’ve seen it set up so that it can track work across kanban teams and scrum teams. Jira has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub. It can manage your CI pipelines as well. Jira is an anything app with a bend towards project management. Setting up jira workflows is a whole career. Source: I worked at Atlassian for…
a) Support tickets, sprint planning, kanban etc are all part of project management. b) It can't manage your pipelines. It can visualise deployments and link them to work but you still need some sort of CI/CD tool like Bitbucket, Github etc. c) It is not an anything app. I can't use it as a wiki, CRM, database, calendar etc.
A) yes
B) it can manage pipelines through those services. Each card change would kick off pipelines whose status updates would cause jira to further change cards potentially kicking off more ci/cd steps.
C) you absolutely can use it as a database, calendar, and a wiki.
It has an api and can store data. You can query cards by label, search by content, and extract structured information from them.
Nested and linked cards provide the tools needed to build wikis.
I’m not 100% sure what the difference between CRMs and support ticketing system are, but Jira instances have been used as support ticketing systems in order to give devs view into what customers want.
It’s not the best at any of those things, but those are all doable (and are being done) with jira.
Re: Notion's mid-life crisis
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
people also use jira as a support ticket system. Sprint planning system. Kanban system. I’ve seen it set up so that it can track work across kanban teams and scrum teams. Jira has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub. It can manage your CI pipelines as well. Jira is an anything app with a bend towards project management. Setting up jira workflows is a whole career. Source: I worked at Atlassian for…
Yeah but saying Jira is like Notion makes fundamentally no sense when Confluence is sitting like... Right there...
Yeah… that’s Atlassian for you. Why sell just Jira when you can sell jira, confluence, bitbucket, opsgenie, and atlas as part of the Atlassian cloud platform.
This is the company that (already having owned jira) bought trello and did nothing with it for 5 years.