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What's the best easy-to-get-started internal company wiki tool? Notion seemed useful at a startup I consulted for, but I too experienced some of the quirks the author mentions.
(Disclaimer: I work on Notion) To me, the most interesting feedback here is that seamless-editable-by-default is a negative for this user, and as a work-around, this organization locks/unlocks every page. This is surprising to me because I find content locks and editing friction very annoying. For example I used Quip for many years, which locks any block currently being edited by someone else, which can be quite frus…
I don't mind any of these issues to be honest, but I do mind how hopelessly slow it is. Is it also super sluggish for all you SF Bay area people? I can't tell if it's just network latency on a heavy protocol, or just slow slow.
I love Notion, but also agree with all of this. Unfortunately there are no alternatives. (Waiting for this to be released, https://nvultra.com/ )
At quick glance it looks like nvultra is very similar to Bear ( https://bear.app ). It looks like nvultra's concept of folder based notebooks is an improvement and a nice feature. In Bear I just have every note in reverse chronological order and rely on the excellent search to find what I need. I have been using Bear daily for over 3 years and the features and Markdown support are great. Not affiliated, just a fan/cu…
So, I'm stuck using Bear for personal use only because I don't want to contaminate my personal time.
I love Notion, but also agree with all of this. Unfortunately there are no alternatives. (Waiting for this to be released, https://nvultra.com/ )
(Disclaimer: I work on Notion) To me, the most interesting feedback here is that seamless-editable-by-default is a negative for this user, and as a work-around, this organization locks/unlocks every page. This is surprising to me because I find content locks and editing friction very annoying. For example I used Quip for many years, which locks any block currently being edited by someone else, which can be quite frus…
Several months ago, I got so fed up with edit-by-default that I started a chat in the feedback thing in the lower-right. What I learned from that chat is that other people weren't using Notion the same way we are. We use it largely as a wiki & knowledge base; it hadn't occurred to me that other people aren't using it as a knowledge base, which is almost by definition read-heavy.
But I also want to point out that editable-by-default is exacerbated because other aspects of the UI have trained me to have behaviors that result in accidental edits.
----
Me:
> I'm sick of making accidental edits.
> 9 times out of 10, when I go to page it's to read it not to edit it. Editing is rare enough that when I want to do it I'm 100% down with having to click an "edit" button or something to explicitly switch to an editing mode.
> This isn't a permissions thing. I should be allowed to edit all of these pages. It's a UI thing that it's too easy to accidentally edit.
> This is an account-scoped problem. It shouldn't be broader; other people in the org shouldn't be affected by my preferences. It shouldn't be narrower; I don't want to have to configure this for each page.
> Many parts of the UI seem to be designed to cause accidental edits. Positioning the cursor at just the right spot can introduce an empty line. It's easy to accidentally drag something when highlighting text to copy. Clicking a link to another Notion page opens in the same tab normally, so I get in the habit of middle-clicking them to open in a new tab. But if it's an external link, then for some moronic reason middle-click doesn't open it (just use damn `` elements! stop breaking the web!), and then I get middle-click paste (because X11) and I end up accidentally pasting some garbage in to the page-- _because of a behavior that other parts of the UI trained me to do_.
> I'm sorry for the rant, but it seems like such a basic thing, and it's been so frustrating.
> Like, my ideal resolution is you point out a setting on a page that I missed and I say "nevermind, cheers".
Gerard:
> (a lengthy reply explaining how to use page locks and database locks)
Me:
> Re: Page lock: That's not a solution, for a bunch of reasons that I'd tried to express in the original message:
> - I don't want to manage this for individual pages, that is error-prone and tedious; if there's a page that doesn't have it set, I won't notice that it's not set and risk making accidental edits. I don't want to have to remember to turn it back on after making an edit.
> - I don't want prevent others from editing it, just myself
> - I don't want others turning off the page lock to affect me. I don't want to have to train everyone to always set it after editing a page.
> Re: Database lock: I'm not sure about other parts of the org, but I don't really use database pages, so that's not of interest to me.
Winnie:
> Hello Luke,
> Winnie here, jumping in for Gerard. Thanks for sharing your thoughtful feedback!
> We don't currently have page setting that lets you be on a viewing mode and have some sort of prompt if you want to edit a page. It’s a legit use case, though, and definitely something we want to support in the future.
> This would totally help those that are creating wikis or knowledgebase, so I've passed this to our product team to take to heart for further improvements.
- The performance. Just awful on my MacBook that this a couple years old (read, nothing extreme at all). It's of course better on my shiny new desktop but fundamentally, it's been slow there too.
- Tables. If performance was tolerable elsewhere, tables are not. Everything is 2x slower. Wouldn't even think of attempting to use them on my phone (which also isn't old)
- Where are my billing setting on the app? Nowhere to be seen. And not on the website either, unless I go into desktop mode. I was thinking it was free for a couple months because I couldn't find the settings.
- Launch time. Don't get me started. When I used it i tried to never close it to avoid the launch times.
In the end I switched over the list-stuff to Todoist which had served me good, but it's of course missing the whole smart doc thing. I really don't understand if the devs all have beast machines or if they just don't care about performance at all. I'm not trying the product again in a while.
(Disclaimer: I work on Notion) To me, the most interesting feedback here is that seamless-editable-by-default is a negative for this user, and as a work-around, this organization locks/unlocks every page. This is surprising to me because I find content locks and editing friction very annoying. For example I used Quip for many years, which locks any block currently being edited by someone else, which can be quite frus…
It definitely depends on the purpose of the document. But I do find that people who are not experienced with notion will accidentally edit anything and everything that isn't locked if you share it with them. In an organization where one team is using notion and is using it to share docs to others that haven't gotten used to it yet, or where you constantly have new team members encountering it for the first time, lock…
I'd love for these to be fixed and the performance to be improved, but Notion is a great tool. We ran our whole startup on it, and I recommend it to everyone.
I love Notion, but also agree with all of this. Unfortunately there are no alternatives. (Waiting for this to be released, https://nvultra.com/ )
I clicked the link out of curiosity wondering if it's based on Notational Velocity (a project which I enjoy!). In case anyone else reading this was wondering about that... I never found an answer (though it does claim to be compatible with the nvALT and Notational Velocity url handlers).