Every time I use notion I can feel the PMs working there under pressure to ship some arbitrary (more often than not "AI") feature each quarter to meet some arbitrary KPI set by leadership.
The base product was originally great: very smooth wysiwyg collaborative document editor with wiki-like linking. The problem is you don't need to do much on top of that. But clearly investors demand some "results" so PMs need to keep coming up with features that can be shipped in a quarter. Meanwhile bugs in the basic UX are plentiful.
Any really interesting work to improve the basic "collaborative document" experience is going to take time and experimentation, and I'm sure there's something to be found there. But the investor fueled focus on constantly doing something new and shiny means these really interesting spaces will never be explore and the product will continue to degrade with bloat each quarter.
It's really too bad. I looked at Notion pretty extensively not long after it launched and it seemed really good compared to tools like OneNote. I wasn't at a place where I could transition to it at the time but remembered it. Several years later when I was looking for new tooling, I looked at it again and was puzzled that it seemed kinda slow and convoluted.
It's unfortunate that it's an online service. At least with tools like OneNote, now that it's been screwed up with cloud, AI, etc we can still go back to the old perpetual license, local-first versions which are still great.
That sounds like most of software engineering. After a product reaches maturity, very little feature development is actually needed. None of SAP's clients are asking for AI (yet we get Joule), nobody using Office wanted Copilot.
Meanwhile consumers have been asking for better Siri for ages, and that hasn't been delivered yet.
Notion's USP was always simplicity. Anyone could use it, anyone could find data in it, the lack of features was a selling point. But, as you say, the attitude changed at some point from aggressive simplicity to feature bloat and now AI slop.
The app you're looking for is Obsidian. Notion abandoned that goal years ago. Notion is making money for being a project management / team wiki. They don't care personal note taking.
I've looked yesterday on replit. It used to be such a nice tool to play with various languages, be able to create a, say, python file, share it with students, etc.
Now you are welcomed by a "AI chat" that wants me to specify what a great application I want to create. Total madness...
I find that I get most value out of less memorable notes in my Obsidian, because for the more memorable ones my brain is able to stay on top of it.
I use LLMs to extract key points, make proposals or generate a short summary, but I personally want to manually be responsible for adding all this and I don't want my note taking tool to do this unsupervised in the background.
Forgive me for living in a cave, but is there any reason to use Notion if you don’t need the collaboration features? My experience with Notion on an M2 MacBook Air (8 GB RAM) is that it brings the machine to its knees.
It strikes me that if Notion is a nice wrapper for a database, and the agent is being tasked with interfacing with that wrapper, why not skip the wrapper entirely? If they’re trying to offload most of your interaction with the application to an LLM agent, it seems like it doesn’t matter where the data lives. So why not use a Claude Code agent to do the same things for you locally?
> is there any reason to use Notion if you don't need the collaboration features
I assume the alternative here is Obsidian.
It does have features that Obsidian doesn't have (like better URL preview). But it's mostly UI stuff. If you literally just want to manage some .md notes I'd say there isn't a reason to use Notion.
I really like the web experience of Notion. (In terms of looks and feels). And it's probably the only note-taking app I like that syncs across everything automagically.
It would've really helped if they worked on improving their subpar mobile apps, but instead they are focusing on AI features.
(Which, I don't see much incremental benefit in paying for separately, if I already pay for other AI subs like chatgpt).
It’s wild they do not talk about accountability features for the ai at all. I.e how do I even know if it has hallucinated if it can do anything anywhere in the workspace?
Rare occasion where beloved project doubled down on the wrong direction. Instead of a personal knowledge base it becomes a company's knowledge base with little to no effort in improving "singleplayer" experience.
Great reminder to export all Notion data to markdown and use a different tool.
Readit News
The base product was originally great: very smooth wysiwyg collaborative document editor with wiki-like linking. The problem is you don't need to do much on top of that. But clearly investors demand some "results" so PMs need to keep coming up with features that can be shipped in a quarter. Meanwhile bugs in the basic UX are plentiful.
Any really interesting work to improve the basic "collaborative document" experience is going to take time and experimentation, and I'm sure there's something to be found there. But the investor fueled focus on constantly doing something new and shiny means these really interesting spaces will never be explore and the product will continue to degrade with bloat each quarter.
It's unfortunate that it's an online service. At least with tools like OneNote, now that it's been screwed up with cloud, AI, etc we can still go back to the old perpetual license, local-first versions which are still great.
(Databases was, and still are, a bit half-baked but the thing was relatively fast & powerful vs say Confluence or Apple Notes)
Meanwhile consumers have been asking for better Siri for ages, and that hasn't been delivered yet.
Now you are welcomed by a "AI chat" that wants me to specify what a great application I want to create. Total madness...
I use LLMs to extract key points, make proposals or generate a short summary, but I personally want to manually be responsible for adding all this and I don't want my note taking tool to do this unsupervised in the background.
But instead more ai slop.
And thats not the worst. Every time when a company adds ai features, i know they want to train on my data sooner or later.
So hard pass for that one.
edit: seems like webhooks are here now. Will give them a try, but knowing notion, expect wild limitations
What on god's green earth sort of a line is this?
It strikes me that if Notion is a nice wrapper for a database, and the agent is being tasked with interfacing with that wrapper, why not skip the wrapper entirely? If they’re trying to offload most of your interaction with the application to an LLM agent, it seems like it doesn’t matter where the data lives. So why not use a Claude Code agent to do the same things for you locally?
I assume the alternative here is Obsidian.
It does have features that Obsidian doesn't have (like better URL preview). But it's mostly UI stuff. If you literally just want to manage some .md notes I'd say there isn't a reason to use Notion.
It would've really helped if they worked on improving their subpar mobile apps, but instead they are focusing on AI features.
(Which, I don't see much incremental benefit in paying for separately, if I already pay for other AI subs like chatgpt).
Great reminder to export all Notion data to markdown and use a different tool.