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Notion's mid-life crisis

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Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#21

Post by diego_sandoval »

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…

I started as an Obsidian user, and generally I like the fact that it's just Markdown, but markdown tables really suck, to the point that I simply ended up avoiding them at all costs, and I used OnlyOffice's Excel equivalent in parallel to Obsidian for a while.

But Notion has good tables by default, so I can have both good tables (and tableviews) and normal text files in the same app.

I could have tried Obsidian plugins, but I suspect that it would have been a time sink, and Notion offered everything in a neat package, so in the end, it won.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#22

Post by anonygler »

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 seems better than Confluence, I’ve never actually authored a single thing in it. It has no overlap with my goals. The world should be accessible from my IDE, and if I were them that’s where I’d really focus: a bi-directional sync and a first class VS Code plugin for whatever their file format looks like.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#23

Post by hinkley »

prdonahue wrote: post #20

Notion 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’ve gotten out of the habit but I could definitely see how in a set of dependent code reviews one might want to be able to update a sequence of statuses in a matter of minutes to land a bunch of changes back to back to back, plowing through using a CLI or keyboard shortcuts.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#24

Post by hackernewds »

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…

I'm very curious how and why to use Obsidian well. It's so confusing I've given up multiple times.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#25

Post by base698 »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #21
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…

I started as an Obsidian user, and generally I like the fact that it's just Markdown, but markdown tables really suck, to the point that I simply ended up avoiding them at all costs, and I used OnlyOffice's Excel equivalent in parallel to Obsidian for a while. But Notion has good tables by default, so I can have both good tables (and tableviews) and normal text files in the same app. I could have tried Obsidian plugi…

I just migrated everything out of Notion into Ibsidian. Notion was unusable after more than a few hundred items in a DB. I migrated to using dataview and lists in Obsidian and haven't had a problem since. And it works offline.

I use it for my workout logbook and cooking/recipe log with hundreds of entries.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#26

Post by crooked-v »

hackernewds wrote: post #24
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…

I'm very curious how and why to use Obsidian well. It's so confusing I've given up multiple times.

It's just ("just" in the good sense) a fancy Markdown editor with a bunch of plugins, including for most of the core features (which are just bundled-in plugins and can be turned off).

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#27

Post by anonygler »

Multicomp wrote: post #6
danpalmer wrote: post #2

This is a fun piece of creative writing, but I’m not quite sure of the point it’s trying to make about Notion. Is it that Notion is no longer cool? That might be true but isn’t the most insightful comment. Is it about Notion the company languishing in some way?

Notion is jumping the shark by moving from being a notes organization / mini database product to trying to compete with Salesforce and Hubspot. Just completely a different sector / product.

This is an issue for all the low/no code tools. Every meaningful problem has a first class SaaS product that solves it well.

Notion/Retool/Airtable/Coda/Etc are fighting over a cursed long tail and their employees are slowly going insane trying to generalize asymptotic industries. The “AI” rebranding has no doubt made them want to put a gun in their mouths.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#28

Post by jprete »

lovethevoid wrote: post #5
bigyikes wrote: post #3

Funny, but how wrong are they? I haven’t had the misfortune of using Salesforce, but isn’t it a glorified relational DB in the same way that Jira is? I know a few people at Notion, and one thing I can say is that they have taste , in the way Apple has taste. I think this shows in their product.

We’re all glorified relational DB when you think about it lol Notion was one of THE new tastemakers. Every startup copying their designs, now there’s AI generators to make “notion style art”. To see their new pages and additions have such clunky copyrighting is disappointing and I hope just temporary, not a sign the tastemakers have left the company.

Copyrighting, or copy-writing?

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#29

Post by tomjakubowski »

hackernewds wrote: post #24
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…

I'm very curious how and why to use Obsidian well. It's so confusing I've given up multiple times.

Think of it like maintaining your own personal Wiki, comprised of flat-file markdown
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