Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notion's mid-life crisis

jjinux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 163 posts

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#71

Post by dboreham »

BadHumans wrote: post #63
apsurd wrote: post #55

Another 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…

Notion is popular because it is infinitely customizable. Want to draw in your Notion database? Done. Want to do Kanban? Easy. Gantt Charts? Child's play. Whatever you want Notion to do it likely can be and it is available on any device you want and you can share it with your team so working with other people is not a pain in the ass like it is with most plain text note taking.

Speaking as someone who tried quite hard to make it do the thing I wanted, not sure that's true.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#72

Post by [deleted] »

apsurd wrote: post #55

Another 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…

[deleted]

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#73

Post by jitl »

staplers wrote: post #9
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?

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 is typical for any product trying to make search good.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#74

Post by dgunay »

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…

I don't get why Notion is so popular either, but your complaints about it seem like a skill issue on the part of your managers. I see this a lot too, but in my experience it happens no matter the medium - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, etc. People who don't obsess over keeping it organized eventually spaghetti their documentation all over the place. I wouldn't expect the kinds of people who need to be convinced of the worth of refactoring and getting rid of old code to also understand that out of date documentation needs to be updated or it is often more harmful than just deleting it.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#75

Post by richardlblair »

apsurd wrote: post #55

Another 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…

I was thinking about a super simple app I wanted to whip together today... Then I realized I can just do what I want in Notion with almost 0 effort.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#76

Post by llamaLord »

dartos wrote: post #64
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.

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...

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#77

Post by apsurd »

JojoFatsani wrote: post #66
apsurd wrote: post #55

Another 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…

God I hate notion. The way it splits columns until you have like two horizontal inches to type in, the rubber-band linking of documents, just the total lack of opinionation outside of templates.. I might be strange but I just really vibed with Confluence and I’d be happy with it if people would commit to it.

lol you reminded me when i very first onboarded to notion i kept trying to write something and the magic paragraph thing kept popping up and im like WTF can i just… i'm trying to… wtf… and i wanted to try to use it, so i looked up the magic and i kept trying to magic and it just went zero to a million i guess in my understanding. no idea how to get collapsible sections.

I felt very dumb. Like i just want to write this thing and it wants me to be more magical about what i'm trying to write and fuck it's just text, get the fuck out of my way.

i think it's just there are notion users and then there's everyone else. I recovered in my self love again. I use txt files in my ancient sublime editor :)

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#78

Post by bastawhiz »

dcchambers wrote: post #67

I generally think Notion is a pretty great product but IMO it's the poster child for "jack of all trades, master of none." Yes, lots of things can be done in Notion, but most of them are done better elsewhere with dedicated tools. I think it's core functionality as a team wiki (aka a confluence replacement) is the one thing it does best and better than most competitors...

That's sort of the draw. I don't need the best bug tracker, I need a bug tracker that I can get pretty much whatever I need to do done in. I don't need the best wiki, I just need to be able to write reasonably formatted docs with syntax highlighting and links. Notion explicitly isn't the best at any of these things, it's maybe an 8/10 on the best of days. But it's priced at an 8/10 and the search works across the whole damn thing, and nothing that it does is really all that bad.

On the other hand, Confluence does really just one thing. But it doesn't do it especially well, and there's lots of things that it can do that are bolted on haphazardly. Go ahead, try to embed that Loom video. I double dog dare you to try to configure it to show Git commits from GitHub. IMO something that isn't good that's purpose built is actively worse than something that does everything pretty okay.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#79

Post by easeout »

iforgotmysocks wrote: post #70
apsurd wrote: post #55

Another 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.

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 selection and editing, voice memos, collaborative editing… Not to mention it's still a regular app and you can have as many note windows as you want.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#80

Post by niyogi »

notion was the beneficiary of the mass exodus of users who felt betrayed by evernote's weird pricing change many years ago. they had a great evernote importer which made it easy to migrate and then grew way beyond the elegant simple product they once were.

a new notion is lurking somewhere waiting to ride in the wake of a growing disgruntled pile of notion users

Post reply on HN