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managers I worked with in the past few years have become a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date, hard to find, and often superseded by some new Notion page they created but forgot to tell us about until we had spent weeks following the old one.
In a way, Notion has come to occupy the same space as Jira for me: A tool that tries to be everything to everyone and gets abused by people who feel like using as many features as possible is a best practice.
I’ve had better success lately asking people to step outside of Notion and instead work in an old-fashioned shared Google doc. It’s amazing how much more productive we can all be when the tools are simplified to exactly what we need and people don’t feel like they need to sprinkle emojis and checklists and other features into everything just because they can.
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of people who need to be convinced of the worth of refactoring and getting rid of old code to also understand that out of date documentation needs to be updated or it is often more harmful than just deleting it.
> a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date
I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.
A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.
Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...
Emoji overuse aside, you are describing the challenge of maintaining a team wiki, regardless of software. Google Docs is taking people out of the wiki mindset, I suspect.
I agree there are issues any time the bored folks in “product” are allowed to set up, well, anything, honestly.
> 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.
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 5 years and they use jira as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into jira.
The 4th, a Wiki, is of course more-so just Confluence, but I have seen echoes of a wiki make their way into Jira; e.g. in one place I worked, every release was a ticket that was duplicated from a previous ticket, and that ticket had step-by-step instructions on how to run different parts of the release.
You're just wrong on this, bro. Notion tries to be everything to everyone. Jira is everything to everyone, it doesn't matter what it tries to be.
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 most startups using Notion already had Google Workspace for email anyways, so there was no growth story there for Google to invest in this mandate.
Now, Notion's done a lot since then. If you want a knowledge base that can also have semi-structured tabular data, and portability in that data, it's hard to beat. Notion AI, pulling from disparate sources with the context of the current planning document, is really neat, too! But not every company will want to pay the per-head cost for this, unless it can replace other existing tools.
And when it comes to spaces like CRM in that context, looking at https://www.google.com/search?q=notion+crm&udm=14 ... there's a lot that could be said about Notion's (lack of) SEO/advertising there, but more concretely, a CRM solution nowadays has to bring a wealth of integrations as a near-prerequisite, and Notion doesn't have a mature story there - nor can they easily, because different customers will have different data models that make it hard to have a standardized notion of "what fields can I count on to be present for an Account."
Notion is a really powerful system. If it didn't already have a $10B valuation, it would be in tremendously good shape. But it has a long way to go to find the areas of growth it needs to grow beyond $10B.
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.
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 interesting, the article itself is a dud after reading it.
we live in a world where Notion is a multi billion dollar company and i have no idea why—now that's interesting!
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Apple Notes is pretty close to perfect for me - it's just missing Markdown support and backlinks.
I did just figure out how to link notes together with the '>>' shortcut, which is a game-changer. I've tried a bunch of other apps, but I always come back to Notes.
Humans naturally love to twiddle knobs and move things around. Notion attaches that behavior with money making through an affiliate program. Result is a billion dollar company.
Notion is popular with college/university students, which is why there are a billion "Notion Template" videos online. Many have productized their templates and turned them into something to sell -- sort of like selling notebooks with Cornell note-taking method pattern built in, back in the old days.
I see it at similar to Figma in the sense that both tools are cloud-based and free, and their users love yapping about it.
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 of my usage of those is really anything that couldn't just be a plaintext table in a markdown doc.
One of these days I'll get up the gumption to crawl through, excise what's worth keeping into Obsidian , and cancel my subscription. But not today, lol.
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.
I will say that Obsidian's tables have gotten a lot better in terms of reflow, sorting, etc. At some point Obsidian might add some additional config to their tables to allow users to manually control column widths, etc., but it would have to be non-standard markdown - like how you can scale down images by adding a width parameter.
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.
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 simply no supported way to do that I'm aware of.
I mean, it's fine, using a i7 core at 100% at all times just to produce text at a 2 second delay is totally fine for a text editor, I'm sure notion's doing its best.
Don't buy into all the crazy around it. It's a Markdown editor with some organisation features. If you read Reddit, people treat it like some sort of second coming, making sure EVERY NOTE THEY TAKE is linked at least one other, tagged, etc. Like somehow that makes notes better.
I was confused at first too but once I realised most of these people are insane and it's a note taking app, it's very easy simple and quick to use. I love it.
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).
It's a pretty simple note organizer for markdown notes. That's literally it. Vaults/folders/subfolders are 1:1 representations of the folders on your physical computer.
It's WYSIWYG, so even if you don't know markdown, you can just use standard shortcuts like Ctrl-B to bold something, Ctrl-I to italicize, etc.
But it's only as valuable as the notes that it contains. If you are a fastidious note taker (for your projects, work, etc), like to ontologically tag things, and appreciate building inter-related knowledge (like wikipedia links), then you'd be hard pressed to find a better substitute even compared to other heavy hitters like Joplin and Logseq.
At its simplest, it is a UI to markdown files. When I was first looking into it, it seemed very tightly coupled with the zettelkasten method which I know nothing about. At first I thought that I was missing something but have since used it as just a markdown note app.
I will asked ChatGPT to output responses in a note form in markdown so I can copy/paste it in.
You can wrap code with:
‘’’elixir
Code here
‘’’
To get syntax highlighting
So far, the only weakness I've found with Obsidian are the tables. Someone needs to build in a killer tables feature. Obsidian is an Electron app; it shouldn't be too hard to build a stripped down version of Google Sheets.
For basic notes, the ones that come with most devices imo are very good. Apple notes, Samsung notes, Onenote, all very good. So good I find it difficult to recommend anything else to people, like Notion still doesn’t even have proper pen/stylus support. Obsidian to me fits a good niche of being extensible with plugins but I get why some people can’t get into it.
Notion shines with database use, and was how I used to write my blogs and connecting the API directly to my site to auto update. I’m surprised you’re a paying customer and barely use the database stuff!
I think once I started using databases it made other note-taking tools seem primitive in comparison. It's hard to explain why, but it just allows you to organise and categorise hundreds of notes seamlessly.
I also really like how it treats everything as blocks, that's another thing that I can no longer live without.
If you're not interested in features like this, then yeah. Obsidian would be a good use-case.
It still blows my mind that Google Docs still haven't taken over Notion's business altogether. I have used Notion for ~6 months for my own company, ended up going back to Google Docs because it was not worth it. I am sure there are a billion other uses of it, we weren't using any of its database-like features, just as an internal documentation platform, but still fascinating to see a business thrive on the lack of innovation of a giant.
In practice, Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users. I guess they don't have a financial incentive to make docs better, but I would gladly pay extra to have everything there.
I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.
> Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users.
Technically they can. Organisationally they can't.
> I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.
You won't though, or at best you'll make a rough-and-ready version that works for you. Polished stuff doesn't get created without a business model, and you can't make a business model out of a browser extension that messes with a third-party site, not these days anyway.
I am not a huge fan of Notion either, but documentation organization is a huge strength of the tool. Google Docs is too heavy by comparison. Additionally, Notions database capabilities cannot be ignored. You can easily make Notion a task tracker that lives with your documentation. Huge.
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?
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.
You can turn Notion AI off in your tenant. It takes a few days, but support will do it. It's annoying that we have to ask instead of toggling a switch, but there you go.
Thanks for the Anytype rec. I have similarly been looking for a good alternative since they turned on AI features you can’t easily opt out of. And I’m not some anti-LLM zealot — I use them every day.
I’m not even worried about them training on user data. The more immediate problem is that if you accidentally type something in the Ask AI box (which is very easy to do because it looks like search), the page you’re on and god know what else is sent to god knows where. When I use LLMs, I like to know which one I’m using and exactly what I’m sending them.
I felt their AI integration was very cavalier and it completely changed my opinion of them as a company. On top of that, the YouTube and Tik Tok productivity grifters thrive on the ecosystem of template BS that Notion seems very happy to encourage. I guess they can’t help it but it is not my vibe. I also want something more stripped down and programmable. Obviously a programmer is not a typical consumer.
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.
I've been doing the sales engineer thing for a few years now. Salesforce management is a big part of my job, as this is what the salespeople use to track opportunities and deals.
The data that goes into SFDC is a big part of what gets reported on in sales/revenue forecasts, so it existing is extremely important and is a big reason why Marc Benioff has, like, a billion yachts.
At its core, SFDC is nothing more than a database and a shitload of plugins that enter stuff into that database.
Notion can, theoretically, do this as well.
Given how large the TAM is for revenue management software and how much Marc pays to acquire anything in his space, Notion chasing that market makes a lot of sense.
Often this happens when companies raising more funds when there are no funds available for that sector. Suddenly it's not cool to be a car rental company, they also need to become a logistics platform or bank.
I imported a friend of mine's Notion into Fraxinus, some software I wrote that is a bookmark manager and a webcrawler and an image sorter and a search engine and annotation system and a visualization tool and is likely to get merged with my YOShInOn RSS reader and model trainer (might eat all my side projects that aren't about images and VR.) It's a tool for understanding, organizing and harvesting a collection of documents (so I got some insight into how he uses Notion.)
In his case, he uses it as a CRM for prospecting and it really isn't that bad at the business development end where you don't have a lot of people doing a structured process. But if you could somehow add some structure to notion, in the UI or with some AI interpretation of the text, or both, I could see Notion becoming a CRM or something else, think of something like a spreadsheet for notes.
Of course it might not be Notion that does it, it might be a startup that does it, it might be an established company. Saleforce is a good comparable because you can customize Salesforce to build many kinds of application but you still need programmers to do it. Is somebody in 2024 going to build a system which is as flexible, maybe even more flexible, but doesn't need the programmer?
It's middle aged and not exciting anymore? Doesn't know what else to do so it buys a sports car (adds AI). Just guessing but I know I am much less excited about notion than I was 4 years ago and maybe that's the point or maybe that's just how it resonated with me.
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 export stuff as markdown, but if I export as markdown, edit and reimport, I lose half of the formatting – even basic formatting which is part of the markdown spec.
Their native format (which their API exposes) is a bunch of extremely complex JSON blobs. I thought about writing a tool to let me download stuff, edit it in a sane text editor, then reupload it, but when I saw the complexity I just gave up.
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.
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.
Actually today's Confluence is much better than Notion in my opinion.
It has a built in Figma style diagram/flow-chart editor which is handy for architecture documents, infinite array of plugins and the interface is simple, clean and focused.
Notion has become this kitchen sink app where even editing a table is a convoluted mess of an experience.
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In a way, Notion has come to occupy the same space as Jira for me: A tool that tries to be everything to everyone and gets abused by people who feel like using as many features as possible is a best practice.
I’ve had better success lately asking people to step outside of Notion and instead work in an old-fashioned shared Google doc. It’s amazing how much more productive we can all be when the tools are simplified to exactly what we need and people don’t feel like they need to sprinkle emojis and checklists and other features into everything just because they can.
I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.
A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.
Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...
To be fair that’s not on Notion per se, there’s an underlying communication problem (which it sounds like your google doc solves!).
I agree there are issues any time the bored folks in “product” are allowed to set up, well, anything, honestly.
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.
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.
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 5 years and they use jira as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into jira.
The 4th, a Wiki, is of course more-so just Confluence, but I have seen echoes of a wiki make their way into Jira; e.g. in one place I worked, every release was a ticket that was duplicated from a previous ticket, and that ticket had step-by-step instructions on how to run different parts of the release.
You're just wrong on this, bro. Notion tries to be everything to everyone. Jira is everything to everyone, it doesn't matter what it tries to be.
Now, Notion's done a lot since then. If you want a knowledge base that can also have semi-structured tabular data, and portability in that data, it's hard to beat. Notion AI, pulling from disparate sources with the context of the current planning document, is really neat, too! But not every company will want to pay the per-head cost for this, unless it can replace other existing tools.
And when it comes to spaces like CRM in that context, looking at https://www.google.com/search?q=notion+crm&udm=14 ... there's a lot that could be said about Notion's (lack of) SEO/advertising there, but more concretely, a CRM solution nowadays has to bring a wealth of integrations as a near-prerequisite, and Notion doesn't have a mature story there - nor can they easily, because different customers will have different data models that make it hard to have a standardized notion of "what fields can I count on to be present for an Account."
Notion is a really powerful system. If it didn't already have a $10B valuation, it would be in tremendously good shape. But it has a long way to go to find the areas of growth it needs to grow beyond $10B.
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 interesting, the article itself is a dud after reading it.
we live in a world where Notion is a multi billion dollar company and i have no idea why—now that's interesting!
I might be strange but I just really vibed with Confluence and I’d be happy with it if people would commit to it.
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 :)
- 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.
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.
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.
I see it at similar to Figma in the sense that both tools are cloud-based and free, and their users love yapping about it.
Deleted Comment
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 of my usage of those is really anything that couldn't just be a plaintext table in a markdown doc.
One of these days I'll get up the gumption to crawl through, excise what's worth keeping into Obsidian , and cancel my subscription. But not today, lol.
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.
I will say that Obsidian's tables have gotten a lot better in terms of reflow, sorting, etc. At some point Obsidian might add some additional config to their tables to allow users to manually control column widths, etc., but it would have to be non-standard markdown - like how you can scale down images by adding a width parameter.
I use it for my workout logbook and cooking/recipe log with hundreds of entries.
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 simply no supported way to do that I'm aware of.
I mean, it's fine, using a i7 core at 100% at all times just to produce text at a 2 second delay is totally fine for a text editor, I'm sure notion's doing its best.
It's WYSIWYG, so even if you don't know markdown, you can just use standard shortcuts like Ctrl-B to bold something, Ctrl-I to italicize, etc.
But it's only as valuable as the notes that it contains. If you are a fastidious note taker (for your projects, work, etc), like to ontologically tag things, and appreciate building inter-related knowledge (like wikipedia links), then you'd be hard pressed to find a better substitute even compared to other heavy hitters like Joplin and Logseq.
I will asked ChatGPT to output responses in a note form in markdown so I can copy/paste it in.
You can wrap code with: ‘’’elixir Code here ‘’’ To get syntax highlighting
Todo lists are as simple as -[ ] to do item
You can use iCloud/dropbox to sync.
HN, never change.
Notion shines with database use, and was how I used to write my blogs and connecting the API directly to my site to auto update. I’m surprised you’re a paying customer and barely use the database stuff!
I also really like how it treats everything as blocks, that's another thing that I can no longer live without.
If you're not interested in features like this, then yeah. Obsidian would be a good use-case.
In practice, Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users. I guess they don't have a financial incentive to make docs better, but I would gladly pay extra to have everything there.
I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.
Technically they can. Organisationally they can't.
> I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.
You won't though, or at best you'll make a rough-and-ready version that works for you. Polished stuff doesn't get created without a business model, and you can't make a business model out of a browser extension that messes with a third-party site, not these days anyway.
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 creative minds.
EDIT: They may say they don't train on user data currently but there's nothing stopping them in the future, especially if they are moving upmarket.
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.
I’m not even worried about them training on user data. The more immediate problem is that if you accidentally type something in the Ask AI box (which is very easy to do because it looks like search), the page you’re on and god know what else is sent to god knows where. When I use LLMs, I like to know which one I’m using and exactly what I’m sending them.
I felt their AI integration was very cavalier and it completely changed my opinion of them as a company. On top of that, the YouTube and Tik Tok productivity grifters thrive on the ecosystem of template BS that Notion seems very happy to encourage. I guess they can’t help it but it is not my vibe. I also want something more stripped down and programmable. Obviously a programmer is not a typical consumer.
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.
And those companies will inevitably want it to do everything
I've been doing the sales engineer thing for a few years now. Salesforce management is a big part of my job, as this is what the salespeople use to track opportunities and deals.
The data that goes into SFDC is a big part of what gets reported on in sales/revenue forecasts, so it existing is extremely important and is a big reason why Marc Benioff has, like, a billion yachts.
At its core, SFDC is nothing more than a database and a shitload of plugins that enter stuff into that database.
Notion can, theoretically, do this as well.
Given how large the TAM is for revenue management software and how much Marc pays to acquire anything in his space, Notion chasing that market makes a lot of sense.
In his case, he uses it as a CRM for prospecting and it really isn't that bad at the business development end where you don't have a lot of people doing a structured process. But if you could somehow add some structure to notion, in the UI or with some AI interpretation of the text, or both, I could see Notion becoming a CRM or something else, think of something like a spreadsheet for notes.
Of course it might not be Notion that does it, it might be a startup that does it, it might be an established company. Saleforce is a good comparable because you can customize Salesforce to build many kinds of application but you still need programmers to do it. Is somebody in 2024 going to build a system which is as flexible, maybe even more flexible, but doesn't need the programmer?
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 export stuff as markdown, but if I export as markdown, edit and reimport, I lose half of the formatting – even basic formatting which is part of the markdown spec.
Their native format (which their API exposes) is a bunch of extremely complex JSON blobs. I thought about writing a tool to let me download stuff, edit it in a sane text editor, then reupload it, but when I saw the complexity I just gave up.
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:
we end up producing a Java-style object like this: 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.Rust's serde calls that "internally tagged": https://serde.rs/enum-representations.html
It has a built in Figma style diagram/flow-chart editor which is handy for architecture documents, infinite array of plugins and the interface is simple, clean and focused.
Notion has become this kitchen sink app where even editing a table is a convoluted mess of an experience.
It has real-time collaboration and support for diagrams (drawio, excalidraw and mermaid).
It can be tempting to want to do it all, but I am focused on building a great wiki and documentation software.
GitHub: https://github.com/docmost/docmost