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

91–100 of 163 posts

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#91

Post by apsurd »

richardlblair wrote: post #75
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.

do tell?

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#92

Post by jen729w »

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.

#tag support across shared Notes is also abysmal. The new tag doesn’t appear as an actual tag in person 2’s system until they ‘initiate’ it.

I tried really hard to love Notes. I wanted to. For the reasons you note, and this one, and many others, I couldn’t.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#93

Post by PaulHoule »

replwoacause wrote: post #89
btown wrote: post #17

I've often thought that, looking historically, Notion only exists because product innovation in Google Docs is decoupled from revenue growth for Google Workspace. Putting a draggable handle, at the user's election, alongside every paragraph in Docs, and adding a customizable shortcut for search across docs, would go a long way towards Docs being 90% of what Notion's value proposition was as of a few years ago. But mo…

It’s just too bad Notion AI can’t see data stored in databases, which is arguably Notions biggest value add and differentiator. So given that it can’t use that data with AI queries really limits the usefulness of it.

Right now tabular data is where LLMs go to die but that's an active research area.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#94

Post by jitl »

skissane wrote: post #37

I use Notion because I have to, not because I like it. Other teams still use Confluence. People said Notion is a lot better than Confluence. Well, I agree I'd rather use it over Confluence, but that's a very low bar for comparison. For ages they didn't have a find-and-replace feature. I just checked, it looks like they've finally added it in the last few months, but this is the first I notice. They claim you can expo…

(I work at Notion)

Our public API format is not the "native" format used by the Notion editor. The overly-nested format we designed the public API is aimed at supporting statically typed programming languages like Java or Golang that do not have (tagged) union types natively. Instead we represent each option in the union type as a nullable field pointing to a nested object. This makes the structure much easier to decode in these kinds of languages, but does make it more verbose.

For a hypothetical typescript union type:

    | { type: 'plain', text: string, format: Formatting }
    | { type: 'link', text: string, href: string, format: Formatting }
    | { type: 'page-mention', page: { id: UUID, spaceId: UUID }, format: Formatting }
we end up producing a Java-style object like this:

    {
      plain?: {
        text: string,
        format: Formatting
      }
      link?: {
        text: string,
        href: string,
        format: Formatting
      }
      pageMention?: {
        page: {
            id: UUID,
            spaceId: UUID
        },
        format: Formatting
      }
    }
You can see the native format by looking at API traffic in your browser devtools. Generally the native format is more confusing without type annotations.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#95

Post by arduinomancer »

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.

I feel like that’s unavoidable because once you get big company clients your PMs start prioritizing their feature requests

And those companies will inevitably want it to do everything

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#97

Post by Supermancho »

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.

> 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.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#98

Post by threeseed »

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…

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.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#99

Post by abhinavk »

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…

Obsidian needs to officially embed SQLite.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#100

Post by abhinavk »

TheDong wrote: post #42
diego_sandoval wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

notion doesn't have normal text files. You can click "export to markdown" on a notion page, you can click "import from markdown", but those two markdown dialects are totally incompatible. Most of the time notion can't even read what it exported. The notion web editor for me has very noticeable lag, so I really want to just be able to write some text somewhere to represent a notion table or whatever, but there's simpl…

Yes. I use Notion (or Logseq or any other Electron-based note-taking apps) as a filing cabinet. I cannot type in it. The typing latency is too much.
Post reply on HN