[HN Gopher] Notion for everyone
___________________________________________________________________
Notion for everyone
Author : FireBeyond
Score : 575 points
Date : 2020-05-19 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.notion.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.notion.so)
| pcx wrote:
| I love using Notion, but I think the general discussion about it
| does not talk enough about how it's flexibility is also a problem
| many times.
|
| 1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks
| in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and
| opinionated approaches like Trello
|
| 2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none.
| We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue
| tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool
| that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is
| possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to
| manually maintain it
|
| 3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team
| members to follow because conventions are not documented
| properly.
|
| But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they
| can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and
| build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One
| platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with
| different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira,
| Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.
| fermienrico wrote:
| Also, the whole Emoji's thing is distracting to me. I just want
| to see plain text in simple san-serif fonts, with borders
| (which are apparently outdated in favor of massive emptiness of
| negative space).
|
| Visual cognitive load is ok as far as the brain can process
| blocks of information. Such as a table with borders. When you
| have emojis, colors, effects, etc without clarity of
| separation, you get something that becomes _tiring_ after a
| little while to look at.
| kixiQu wrote:
| That's funny, because to me, the emoji seem like a nice
| visual differentiator and borders seem hideous.
| [deleted]
| drannex wrote:
| +1 on that, I have an unreal disinterest in emojis in all
| forms.
| jdhornby wrote:
| I've had a similar experience with Notion. "Jack of all trades
| and master of none" resonates strongly with me.
|
| This lead me to my latest startup https://froosthq.com/ which
| is Notion inspired and aimed solely at software teams.
| ultrasandwich wrote:
| wanted to add my email but the console reports "mailchimp
| ajax submit error: error"
| jdhornby wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know, will take a look now. If you
| want to drop me an email "josh@ the website above" then
| I'll add you to the list.
| pcx wrote:
| Looks great, signed up!
| empath75 wrote:
| Imo github is eventually going to subsume all of this
| activity. People don't want to go to more than one place.
| falcor84 wrote:
| If Microsoft could have subsumed "all of this activity", it
| would have by now. This all goes in cycles and there's
| always room for disruption.
| the_monocle wrote:
| I really like the jetbrains solution to this problem.
| https://www.jetbrains.com/space/
| jakaroo wrote:
| Does this product "exist" yet or is it vaporware we're
| putting our email addresses in for? Page seems very light on
| info or even pricing.
| martijn9612 wrote:
| Hey, just noticed a small mistake, or it was just unclear
| from my side. Looks like the "pricing" link links to "learn"
| in the url, while there being nothing about pricing in the
| page itself.
| codegeek wrote:
| I would rephrase "all in one tool" to more specific like
| "project management tool". All in one for software teams
| makes me think that you also offer things like version
| control etc. All-in-one is a very loaded phrase. Just my 2
| cents.
| drcongo wrote:
| That looks pretty nice. I've put my email in your signup as
| this is something that I've built half of about 5 times now.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| What are the five apps called?
| qrt wrote:
| _"One platform for all my data with specialized tools to deal
| with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello,
| Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it."_
|
| -> https://qatalog.com
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Sounds like the curse of Emacs.
| pcx wrote:
| I am a 10yr+ Emacs user, this hit too close to home than I
| would like! I am seeing a lot of momentum in Emacs ecosystem
| for last couple of years and Spacemacs rocks! So hopefully
| it's gonna get better :)
| prennert wrote:
| I just started using orgmode to compliment notion. So far it
| feels to me as Notion is a bit like emacs / orgmode without
| API, and orgmode is a bit like notion without collaboration.
| pickdenis wrote:
| > orgmode is a bit like notion without collaboration
|
| Emacs has a number of collaborative editing solutions:
| https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing
|
| The nice thing about org-mode is that it automatically gets
| all the cool stuff that emacs has. (Although, I have never
| tried any of the solutions listed in that wiki page and I
| suspect even the "working" ones have issues).
| xet7 wrote:
| There is orgmode for web:
|
| https://org-web.org
|
| https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web
| brlewis wrote:
| The curse of emacs is "Jack of all trades and master of ones
| that don't attract new users"
| komali2 wrote:
| Certainly is, though slowly but surely you zero in on the
| "best configuration" for yourself. Whereas when I was using
| vscode, onenote, google keep, and a bunch of other shit to
| manage everything, I had "topped out" at productivity.
|
| I'm trash at vim (I use evil-mode), org mode, and org-agenda,
| but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago
| before I used these tools.
| treebornfrog wrote:
| Regarding your first point, totally agree 100%.
|
| I _want_ to use notion, it 's such a nice UI/UX. Problem is,
| it's just too complicated.
|
| Trello is basic, but gets the job done.
| pagade wrote:
| I am really surprised no one has mentioned https://zenkit.com/.
| Kanban - Wiki - Calendar - List - Mindmap - Hierarchy etc. It
| does those things very well.
| biosed wrote:
| Is data removable, do you use?
| pagade wrote:
| I use it for personal purpose. By data removable, I guess
| you mean right to be forgotten. Their
| https://zenkit.com/en/gdpr/ page provides the details.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Yup, Notion and OneNote occupy similar scenarios for me. It's
| where I can gather my compiled thoughts and notes, but I've had
| trouble implementing any team processes on it due to it not
| being constrained enough in its UI.
|
| I don't think there's any easy answer here. I respect the
| Notion team a lot for making a tool that is so flexible, but
| it's also a curse in some key scenarios.
| mywacaday wrote:
| Onenote is so close as a perfect system for me but what it
| leaves out really hurts. -No task Hierarchy -No alerts for
| due dates (Yes you can add outlook tasks but its flakey) -No
| automatic reporting
| pcx wrote:
| Yeah. I see that it works great for some scenarios, like when
| I and my co-founder are collaborating. But if I try to teach
| it to a sales guy, I can see he just hates it :(
| nso95 wrote:
| Perhaps a wiki or internal QA site would be a good solution.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've tried to use Notion, but my experience mirrors yours:
|
| There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not
| enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without
| jumping through a lot of hoops.
|
| My favorite productivity tools blend into the background. I can
| get down to doing the work without mental overhead of managing
| the tool. Notion, on the other hand, feels like I'm spending
| half of my energy fighting with Notion, and only half of my
| energy doing the work I'm trying to accomplish.
| kmfrk wrote:
| I really need a better index of all my notes, right now it's
| just too overwhelming without a better way of organizing
| everything, especially since it automatically collapses all my
| workspace trees when I close the app. Really gets in the way of
| using it beyond a handful of pages.
| brainzap wrote:
| I miss Trello: add task, edit, save.
| srmatto wrote:
| GitHub more or less offers this in the Projects board
| feature:
|
| https://help.github.com/en/github/managing-your-work-on-
| gith...
| rattray wrote:
| Folks who have used both Trello and gh Projects, how does
| Projects compare?
| xet7 wrote:
| gh Projects
|
| Pro:
|
| - Integrated with GitHub issues
|
| Con:
|
| - Can not move card to other board
|
| - No import/export
|
| - No themes
|
| - No change background image
|
| - Only basic automation of moving cards to Done list etc
|
| Trello
|
| Pro:
|
| - Can move card/list to other boards
|
| - Export to JSON
|
| - GitHub Power-Up for GitHub integration
|
| - Butler for automating, in English
|
| - Themes
|
| - Change background image
|
| - API
|
| Con:
|
| - Only SaaS, can not self-host, not Open Source
|
| - No Swimlanes
|
| - Export to CSV needs paid account
|
| - No Import from JSON/CSV on free version web UI
|
| Wekan https://wekan.github.io
|
| Pro:
|
| - Open Source, can self-host on x64, RasPi3/4 etc
|
| - Import from Trello JSON
| cards/lists/checlists/attachments/labels/votes
|
| - Import CSV, currently importing custom fields in
| progress of being added
|
| - Import from Wekan JSON including attachments
|
| - Export CSV, currently exporting custom fields in
| progress of being added
|
| - Export Wekan JSON including attachments
|
| - IFTTT Rules wizard has translations, but less rules
| than similar Trello Butler
|
| - Swimlanes
|
| - Themes
|
| - Gogs integration https://github.com/wekan/wekan-gogs
|
| - API, Outgoing Webhooks per board, Global Webhooks at
| admin panel of (nearly) all board actions
|
| Con:
|
| - Not integrated with GitHub yet
|
| - No move list to other board yet
|
| - No change background image yet
| etiennebch wrote:
| Less clunky in my opinion if you use it for software
| development because you can link it to issues / PRs and
| automate based on that
| zestyping wrote:
| Can anyone explain to me why Trello is so popular? I'm
| serious; I honestly don't get it.
|
| If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet
| with a row for each task. This scales up easily to a hundred
| tasks or so, and it's straightforward to filter on a column
| to focus on particular categories or statuses. In Trello, I
| can see maybe 30 cards max before my screen space is all used
| up, and I spend so much time hunting around for cards. If a
| card has moved, I have to just read linearly through all the
| cards to find the one I'm looking for. I could use the search
| box, but that only pops up the detail window for the card; it
| doesn't show me where the card is in context.
|
| Trello is like a task spreadsheet where you can only see a
| small amount of information at once, it's really hard to find
| tasks, you can't add custom columns, you can't colour-code
| things the way you want, you can't add tabs, you can't add
| formulas to do simple things like addition, you can't see
| previous versions, and on and on.
|
| So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google
| Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast? Does the whole
| product exist only because people like the cute little
| animation of picking up the tilty little cards and dragging
| them to other columns?
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| You are right that a spreadsheet gets more information on
| the screen, but Trello's kanban layout really highlights
| which task is "where" (in what state).
|
| I've often used it with clients to let them know which
| high-level features are in progress, which are done, etc.
| It has also worked really well for collaborative trip
| planning. Both of these workflows benefit from cards with
| cover images too.
|
| It's not a replacement for a company-wide knowledge base or
| an issue tracker for hundreds of tickets.
| wh-uws wrote:
| I like Trello A LOT have like 30 different boards with
| probably thousands of cards.
|
| Why Trello over Sheets?
|
| I use Trello as basically a really extensible digital
| kanban board.
|
| It also makes easier to associate tasks with each other add
| extra context (for instance if I'm keeping track of some
| long form context associated with a task where would you
| put that in sheets? A note? Can you search those? Once it
| gets really long a Google doc? I guess).
|
| Also can add custom fields. I used this to allow me to add
| weights to cards so they automatically rearrange in
| priority order.
|
| I even have boards that serve as a personal knowledge base.
|
| I feel like Trello gives you really great free reign to
| discover a process for things and have it evolve over time.
|
| Could you accomplish that with sheets? Probably but not as
| elegantly and definitely not with a UI
| tommoor wrote:
| Trello... still exists?
| arkitaip wrote:
| Only on HN can people question the existence of an app
| which has 50M users. Trello might not be this month's
| flavor but I'll be damned if it's not one of the most
| useful planning tools out there.
| asaddhamani wrote:
| I don't know how Trello has 50M users, and how so many
| people and companies can use it for project management.
| For anything more than a single board, I find it terribly
| lacking in functionality. Can't even see all your cards
| across boards without scrolling 50 times.
| OOPMan wrote:
| Using Trello well requires you to ruthlessly process
| cards. Once they start to "overflow" it becomes a
| nightmare
| mynegation wrote:
| I think tommoor is aware that Trello still exists, I read
| it as them questioning parent comment's phrasing "miss
| Trello"
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| > Only on HN can people question the existence of an app
| which has 50M users
|
| 1. GP isn't doing this. You misunderstood. 2. Even if
| they were(they weren't), how would this be something
| exclusive to HN?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| It will soon be dead as Atlassian have started to kill it.
| For example, it now quite often now does browser page
| refresh when I open a card to add a comment. WTF ATLASSIAN!
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| I've found Notion really worthwhile, but the fact it's so
| flexible means you need to go in with a plan so that you can
| really take advantage of it.
|
| I really like how Marie Poulin's sets up her Notion process,
| here's a good example of how to make contextual dashboards -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2AJD4kx80 but there's a bunch
| more, just massive productivity boosts from not having to jump
| between so many different apps/services.
| j45 wrote:
| A meaningful and working integration with Airtable will help
| both products leap forward. Each is good at what they do.
| tablet wrote:
| Good points. It seems you might enjoy Fibery[1], it addresses
| most of these problems (and has internal whiteboard as draw.io
| replacement as well). But I'm biased as a Fibery founder.
|
| [1] https://fibery.io
| mingabunga wrote:
| This looks amazing. Just reading over the docs before I dive
| in.
| aloer wrote:
| your site looks amazing and the I don't get it button is
| really great.
|
| But... even after looking at all the four separate landing
| pages I have no idea what exactly fibery could do for me
| riquito wrote:
| It's customary to mention any involvement when suggesting a
| product
| tablet wrote:
| Thanks for advice, I'll improve!
| pier25 wrote:
| That button "I don't get it..." at the bottom right is
| genius.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| long time notion user here. I was using notion for my personal
| life and it was serving the purpose but when I started using it
| as a project management tool for my dev team I realised how
| crippled it is (no dependent tasks, gantt view etc). maybe I'm
| wrong and notion is not built for this but then again why would
| i use it just for wiki? recently started looking for task
| management+wiki tool.. reviewed more than 10+ tools and finally
| picked an extremely powerful but a less known tool clickup.com
| Fiveplus wrote:
| As an non-user and since a quick glance at the website helps
| little - what exactly is notions USP and what makes it different
| than a standard note taking app synchronous across platforms?
| lilyball wrote:
| Notion is great. My one complaint is the fact that there's no
| "family plan". I currently have a free workspace that I share
| with my spouse, but we're about to hit the 1000 block limit.
| Notion CS's recommendation was for me to use a personal plan and
| invite them to each page we want to share, or to create a top-
| level page that all of the shared pages are nested under and
| invite them to the top-level page alone, but this is very
| annoying. But I don't want to pay $16/mo just for 2 members who
| don't need advanced team features.
| cristinacordova wrote:
| (Notion here) We agree! The new personal plan enables you to
| have unlimited pages & blocks and share with up to 5 guests for
| free. https://www.notion.so/pricing
| pushtheenvelope wrote:
| +1 in exact same situation
| apfsx wrote:
| Same situation with my wife. :/
| MikeKusold wrote:
| This is my exact experience. I wanted to share a page I put
| together for our garden, so we could both edit it. Notion
| wanted 16/mo for us. While that pricing makes sense for a
| company, it doesn't make sense for a household.
| rimjongun wrote:
| They just changed this, pretty great.
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| Currrently I use vimwiki + a cron job to push my wiki to a Gitlab
| repo
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Holy shit. This might be the most beautiful piece of software
| I've ever used. The tutorial is perfect, the onboarding was super
| easy, and the Mac app is really responsive. And it's not owned by
| a huge corporation! I'm in love.
|
| Does anyone have any deep-dive recommendations on how to get the
| most out of Notion?
| nthnclrk wrote:
| Check out Marie Poulin's work on YouTube. She also has a
| 'Notion Mastery' offering: https://mariepoulin.com/notion-
| mastery/
| dmode wrote:
| I have to admit, SV has really cracked and disrupted the note
| taking industry. Evernote, OneNote, Asana, Trello, JIRA, ToDoist,
| and now Notion. I tried most of it and just gave up and started
| to capture my notes in Google docs and Todos in spreadsheet. Now
| that we have disrupted this space, we will soon move on to flying
| cars
| threatofrain wrote:
| I know it's a niche need but any note-taking app I use needs to
| support Latex and code highlighting. Unfortunately, once I throw
| this criteria in just about every app gets excluded, but at least
| VSC + sync is still very nice.
| singhrac wrote:
| Nothing has beaten having a local Hugo server running (with a
| theme that has Katex and syntax highlighting). Note taking can
| be like blogging to yourself, and the flat markdown means it's
| easy to edit and search. I don't have the time to learn
| orgmode, which I'm sure is better.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Take a look at Emvi: https://emvi.com/ We have Latex on our
| roadmap for formulas.
| kixiQu wrote:
| https://tiddlywiki.com/plugins/tiddlywiki/katex/
| https://tiddlywiki.com/plugins/tiddlywiki/highlight/
|
| [my setup is just markdown, really, but it's
| here](https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-
| to-t...)
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| Notion supports Katex if formulas and other related stuff is
| all you care about.
|
| https://katex.org/
| bachmeier wrote:
| Notion supports both. Unfortunately not inline latex equations.
| ivanzhao wrote:
| Hi Notion founder here. Better and inline LaTex support is
| coming very soon (weeks) :-)
| ycombinete wrote:
| Sounds like a good use case for Orgmode.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| So this isn't a structured notes app like Notion, but InkDrop
| has support for Latex and code highlighting. It's not free, but
| it's the only notes app I've ever been willing to pay for aside
| from Bear.
| zakk wrote:
| Try Quiver!
| jkimmel wrote:
| Notion thankfully does support LaTeX, but only in equation mode
| (e.g. `\\[...\\]`, not `\\(...\\)`).
|
| Just type `/math` in a Notion document to bring it up.
| charlesdaniels wrote:
| Joplin[0] supports code highlighting and TeX math. I assume you
| just need TeX for equations, not for the whole document. It's
| also open source, and works with several different sync back-
| ends. I've been using it for some time and am very happy with
| it so far.
|
| 0 - https://joplinapp.org/
| fastball wrote:
| Supernotes[1] has been called "a smaller, faster notion" and
| supports LaTeX (both inline and block, notion only does block)
| and code highlighting.
|
| Disclaimer: I built it.
|
| 1: https://supernotes.app
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| ... You have a cookie pop-up that says, "Can we use cookies?"
| but the only option is a "Yes" button. If you're not giving
| people a choice, why even pretend?
| fastball wrote:
| Tracking scripts / cookies are only loaded if you click
| "Yes", otherwise they are not loaded at all.
| GordonS wrote:
| But if you don't tap "yes" there is no way to dismiss it.
| Not a fan of this behaviour, and won't be looking any
| further.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| This is top-tier HN material right here folks.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If you use dark patterns on your front page, why would I
| ever trust your app?
| fastball wrote:
| How do you see this as a "dark pattern"? I see it as more
| of a reasonable compromise. If you visit my site, I think
| it's reasonable for me to understand how you're using it.
| If you don't want to participate in that, you are given a
| choice. That choice is between being tracked and having a
| mildly distracting banner at the bottom of a landing
| page. This doesn't seem like a betrayal of trust in any
| way. The implicit trust here is that you will not be
| tracked unless you agree to be tracked. This is in fact
| the case.
|
| Of course, on the one hand we _do_ want you to opt in to
| tracking. This _is_ a marketing site, after all. If you
| 're actually interested in the product, tracking helps us
| understand who is interested and why, which in turn
| allows us to improve the product and reach more potential
| users. If you're not interested in the product, you don't
| need to click yes and there is no problem - because
| presumably you won't be spending very much time on the
| landing page for a product you're not interested in.
|
| I think a landing page like this one is slightly
| different from, say, a big cookie banner on a news
| website, as the intent is not really for you to be
| spending a lot of time reading content on this site.
| rockostrich wrote:
| It's a UX dark pattern because (besides deleting the html
| element) there's no way to dismiss a call to action, you
| can only ignore it.
| anchpop wrote:
| Just because it's annoying doesn't mean it's a dark
| pattern in the typical sense of the word. Here's
| darkpatterns.org's definition:
|
| > Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that
| make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying
| or signing up for something.
|
| And here is the one used by the verge [0]:
|
| > A dark pattern is a user interface carefully crafted to
| trick users into doing things they might not otherwise
| do, such as buying insurance with their purchase or
| signing up for recurring bills
|
| Here there's no trickery and no chance that a user would
| unintentionally agree to cookies when they didn't mean
| to. It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until
| you do what they want. It's not unethical, but if you
| don't like it you shouldn't use their site.
|
| [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-
| patterns-ins...
| marktani wrote:
| > It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until
| you do what they want.
|
| Ah, cool then.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Just because it's annoying doesn't mean it's a dark
| pattern in the typical sense of the word.
|
| I'm happy to include multiple forms of coercion; the
| pattern here is the ratchet:
| https://jacquesmattheij.com/dark-patterns-the-ratchet/
|
| > It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until
| you do what they want.
|
| That's a nice summary of a class of dark patterns, yes.
|
| > It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you
| shouldn't use their site.
|
| It absolutely is unethical, and yes as I said above I
| will consider this a good reason to avoid the app.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| This is a perfect example of an app that you would want to self-
| host rather than give random people your personal data on a
| plate. The ability to self-host should be taught at schools so
| that everybody should be independent and actually own their own
| data.
| thatoneguytoo wrote:
| There are major disadvantages to using something like Notion for
| personal work - including non discoverability of work or
| thoughts. Most people are better of with pen and paper.
|
| I've gone into further depth here:
| https://usedone.today/blog/posts/davinci/
| franky47 wrote:
| The one thing that bothers me about Notion (and Slack and other
| "everything in one place" tools), is the lack of encryption. I
| might have FAANGophobia, but whenever there is a free tier
| without a form of end-to-end encryption in place, it feels like a
| data puddle waiting to become a lake.
|
| That being said, having clear-text data would allow features like
| an API on publicly shared pages/blocks, to use Notion as a CMS. I
| have seen some attempts [1] at reverse-engineering their internal
| API, but an official one on a paid plan could be a nice addition.
|
| [1] https://github.com/splitbee/notion-api-worker
| alex_portabella wrote:
| We've been working on Portabella (https://portabella.io) for
| the last four weeks in an effort to bring end-to-end encryption
| to everyday tasks. Currently we support basic kanban boards and
| lists. Like other comments have highlighted there is no reason
| for data not to be encrypted in this day and age.
|
| Currently everything happens client side, however we believe
| homomorphic encryption is at a level of sophistication that
| should support most users and their needs.
| paxys wrote:
| I'm assuming you are talking about end-to-end encryption, which
| in case of tools like Slack doesn't really make sense because
| it's the company that owns and has total control of the data,
| not you the end user. What happens when they need to hand over
| records for discovery, for example?
| franky47 wrote:
| Please elaborate what you mean by discovery ?
| paxys wrote:
| It's a legal term -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law). Most
| countries/industries have some kind of regulation around
| data storage and retention for exactly this purpose.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Hi there. I'm a co-founder of Emvi [1] and we have an API on
| our paid plan (free as we are in beta right now) that you can
| use as a headless CMS. Our blog is an example of it. We have
| (incomplete) client libraries on GitHub [2].
|
| [1] https://emvi.com/
|
| [2] https://github.com/emvi
| Benmcdonald__ wrote:
| There is no easy way to implement client side encryption. You
| will have a private key or long password the you will keep
| safe. You lose that all your data in gone. Plus it's difficult
| to securely move that password to a new platform
| drukenemo wrote:
| Much more critical (imo) software such as Backblaze offers
| full encryption, it's the user choice and responsibility.
| That's what privacy is also about.
| xet7 wrote:
| Maybe it's not easy to have client side encryption, but it
| seems CryptPad has it:
|
| https://cryptpad.fr
|
| https://github.com/xwiki-labs/cryptpad
| chc4 wrote:
| Your data being inaccessible without a private key or
| password is the entire point.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| People rightfully get skittish when there's no "forgot
| password" mechanism to get their account and data back.
|
| I certainly agree that that's the point, but such a system
| needs some potential usability affordances. For instance, a
| key stored in the browser rather than a password the user
| has to remember, and ideally a key synced between multiple
| devices controlled by the user so that the loss or failure
| of one device does not mean loss of the account.
|
| For example, imagine having the browser generate an
| asymmetric key for the user, and making sure browsers store
| such keys (encrypted) in Firefox Sync or equivalent, so
| that the keys are safe even if the user moves to a new
| device or an existing device fails or gets lost.
| franky47 wrote:
| I wrote some ideas on how to implement a password reset
| for end-to-end encrypted apps, reviews and comments are
| welcome:
|
| https://francoisbest.com/posts/2020/password-reset-
| for-e2ee-...
| Benmcdonald__ wrote:
| How do you even sync the key between multiple devices? If
| you send the private key to the server that undoes any
| protection from the encryption
| franky47 wrote:
| You derive a master key from a password, and use that to
| encrypt other keys, or a more complex key chain if
| needed. You then only sync encrypted keys with the
| server.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Firefox Sync has a model that doesn't trust the server.
| drukenemo wrote:
| Exactly. I cannot understand how this can't be the user's
| choice.
| terpimost wrote:
| Search is a problem. Index is available to a saas
| provider.
| franky47 wrote:
| The idea is not to move the password, or any derived key, but
| the clear-text data. GDPR and other laws enforce that you
| give customers the right to access their data (in clear
| text), if possible in an interoperable form. Notion does so
| in CSV and Markdown, which is good enough to transfer to
| another service.
| christian008 wrote:
| Standard Notes is end-to-end encrypted:
| https://standardnotes.org
| _fzslm wrote:
| this is the only thing that stops me from using Notion, too.
| just downloaded it and it looks like it would change my life...
| except i don't own the data.
|
| right now i'm trying out Outline [1] which has an option for
| self hosting.
|
| [1] https://github.com/outline/outline
| abuehrle wrote:
| I just checked out Outline. It seems strange that the landing
| page example is lifted straight from Stripe's docs[1] with
| "Stripe" replaced by "Acme".
|
| [1] https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks#what-are-webhooks
| tommoor wrote:
| Good spot! I guess that was a little cheeky in hindsight...
| johnghanks wrote:
| who cares?
| ezekg wrote:
| I can tell you that a large majority of in-production API
| docs use Stripe's docs as a template. I did it for my
| company, and I've seen a ton of other API services do it.
| Stripe leads in API docs, so it's easier to not reinvent
| the wheel and just do what works. I know this instance
| isn't even for a production product, but meh.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| I just checked outline out and went to try the hosted
| version, but looks like they don't let me sign up with my own
| email. I generate emails for each service I use, and am much
| too lazy to generate a Slack account just to use it to sign
| into this. I suppose I could spin up an instance and self-
| host, but don't want to dedicate 30 mins to just setting this
| up to test it out.
| [deleted]
| tommoor wrote:
| Thanks for the mention!
|
| Outline also has an RPC-style API for the entire project btw,
| the documentation needs a little work but it's there:
| https://getoutline.com/developers
| vz8 wrote:
| Would really appreciate your thoughts on this, if you have
| any initial feedback.
|
| We're considering the self-hosted option too - that's the big
| draw.
| _fzslm wrote:
| i've only been using it for a little bit, but here goes:
|
| * unlike Notion, it's one workspace per instance. makes
| sense, but worth noting as using workspaces as for
| organisational purposes won't work so well here.
|
| * for personal instances, Slack doesn't make all that much
| sense. i see a PR for LDAP support on GitHub, so i will
| play around with that
|
| * supports embeds just like Notion - paste the link and it
| just works. supports codepen, figma, gsuite, youtube and
| others. this was the feature that made me take notice of
| notion, so it's good to see it here.
|
| * even better, the embed API seems pretty easily
| extensible, so the sky's the limit here. i can't wait to
| make some sweet dashboards based on entirely self-hosted
| data!
|
| * no mobile app is a bit of a bummer, but the PWA
| experience works pretty well. considering i'll be authoring
| predominantly on desktop and only reading on iPhone, this
| isn't so much of a big deal for my use case
|
| * no auto-save :(
|
| * you can share a read-only, fully public link of any page
| you want. pretty damn cool.
|
| all in all i'm pretty impressed. it seems pretty robust! i
| mean, it's definitely not as full-fat as Notion, but
| perhaps that's a good thing - and OSS means it's easily
| extensible for whatever you need to use it for. who knows
| which way my opinion will change after some more extensive
| use, but this definitely shows promise.
| rsify wrote:
| Brilliant! My free credits plan was about to expire.
| user0x1d wrote:
| Google Docs on steroids. I approve of it.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| I tried and failed at using Notion due to a lack of recurring
| tasks. Also a lot of what was said on here about being _too_
| unstructured of an environment.
|
| I found myself wasting time setting things up and then not using
| them. I found the community full of people bragging about the
| beautiful minimalism of their dashboards. I'm not sure if anyone
| is "getting things done," however.
|
| I'd be willing to pay Notion for the ability to use recurring
| tasks, but they seem interested in solving every other problem
| with their platform before tackling recurring tasks.
| singhrac wrote:
| Can we talk about how slow it is? Literally the main reason I
| don't use this app (which seems so good for my use cases) is that
| it takes forever to start up on my phone. I can use it on my
| desktop but only because it's a fast machine - I could see a
| Macbook Air struggling to load it.
| cristinacordova wrote:
| We just released some performance improvements across the board
| (improved mobile startup times from a ship a few days ago
| linked here:
| https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1261037710665322496). We'd
| love if you could try it again and we'll definitely continue to
| work on this.
| singhrac wrote:
| Actually, it is quite a bit faster. I'm impressed, thanks.
| nicesave wrote:
| Just tried and it is faster. It took several minutes before
| to load and now it's acceptable.
| nepthar wrote:
| I'd be grateful if one of you product design folks could explain
| the rampant use of emoji. I notice that most things incorporate
| emoji extensively these days. Has that been shown to boost
| engagement or something?
| benkarst wrote:
| So this is basically an ad? Ugh.
| 7ewis wrote:
| Currently use the Student plan, love Notion!
|
| Do sometimes get lost and wonder if I'm doing things in the most
| optimal way though, it's so powerful.
| haolez wrote:
| I'm looking for something similar to Notion for my company's
| internal documentation (including operations), but it needs to be
| internationalized (and Notion isn't).
|
| I've found out about Joplin[1] and thought it was the answer, but
| it seems that I cannot easily share the notes with my team in a
| collaborative manner. A pity! The quest continues.
|
| [1]https://joplinapp.org/
| type0 wrote:
| For small collaborative work CodiMD is great
|
| https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd
| marvinblum wrote:
| What do you mean by internationalized? The user interface? I'm
| the co-founder of Emvi [1]. We support English and German on
| the user interface and you can add languages to your
| organization which allows your members to add translations for
| that languages. So an article can be present in multiple
| languages and use the one you chose as default as a fallback.
|
| [1] https://emvi.com/
| haolez wrote:
| Yes, user interface. I'll take a look at your app!
|
| EDIT: Unfortunately, my company is heavily invested in Office
| 365 (Teams and friends) and we use our Azure AD logins for
| everything. Emvi seems to integrate Google credentials only.
| However, your product looks amazing! That's exactly what I'm
| looking for. I'll be sure to keep an eye on it for when it
| starts supporting Microsoft (i.e. Teams) logins or when (if)
| my company migrates to Google in the future :)
| marvinblum wrote:
| Ah good. Well what language do you need then? As I said we
| support English and German. The articles you write can be
| multilingual.
| haolez wrote:
| Portuguese Brazil, but my team would gladly translate it
| for you.
| marvinblum wrote:
| That would be incredible! It's actually not that much to
| translate I think. Read my comment above and I might come
| back to you.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Thanks! Nice to hear that :) We've thought about AD. Can I
| contact you when we have integrated it? It won't happen in
| the next few weeks but we're definitely looking at it. You
| can send a mail to support@emvi.com and I'll put you on our
| contact list.
| Eugeleo wrote:
| Anybody using Notion for personal knowledge management (lecture
| notes, literature notes, etc). Why do you find it oreferable to
| Roam, Obsidian or some of the other new Zettelkasten approaches?
| marvinblum wrote:
| Some people need structure, which is absolutely fine. But I
| always wanted to throw stuff into it and use the search to
| navigate. You can check out Emvi [1] if you like, I'm on of the
| founders.
|
| [1] https://emvi.com/
| nyxtom wrote:
| It actually deters me away that there is default content already
| there when I load the app. In my opinion, less is more and
| starting off with no content at all is a helpful cleaner
| alternative than having to delete all that default content.
| marvinblum wrote:
| True, but it sometimes helps to get you started. We wrote a
| simple "Get started" article for Emvi [1] which can be deleted
| quickly. But users send us mails asking for documentation,
| which we will add after beta. It's nice to have this
| documentation inside your workspace, but can get in your way
| too. I haven't decided what to prever.
|
| [1] https://emvi.com/
| nojito wrote:
| Notion is the embodiment of busy work --> false sense of being
| productive.
| xenospn wrote:
| That's up to you, really. If you're prone to just making
| everything look pretty without actually using any of the data,
| you'll probably find a way to do the same with any other tool
| out there.
| ponyous wrote:
| It's also a genuinely good note taking app that works on all
| platforms I care about as opposed to Apple Notes.
| ericzawo wrote:
| FWIW you can access your Apple Notes through icloud.com.
| csallen wrote:
| Notion's just a tool, like a pen and a pad. If you decide to
| use it for nothing but busy work, that's an option I suppose.
| But I get a lot of real work done using Notion.
| nojito wrote:
| The act of using Notion is in of itself busy work which
| distracts from productivity.
|
| Not that you are _using_ it for busy work.
|
| It's a strategy used by productivity "gurus" for 100+ years
| to keep the $$ trickling in.
|
| Just a few years ago it was todist...before that it was Omni.
|
| Once notion peaks we will all move on to the next one.
| riezebos wrote:
| According to this description I believe you could also say
| writing tests or using git is just busy work. Nevertheless,
| a lot of people use tools like git and notepad (or notion)
| to organize their work.
| switcheroo wrote:
| I wonder if this was decided because of pressure from Roam?
| erkanerol wrote:
| Note-taking is very similar to blogging. Many people lose so much
| time while searching for the best app instead of taking notes. If
| you want to develop a proper note-taking habit, just start
| writing into somewhere. md files, evernote, notion, etc. after a
| while, you will know your needs and you will be able to pick one
| of them easily. I have been using https://www.zoho.com/notebook/
| for a while and I am happy with it. Since my needs are extremely
| simple: bullets, tags, groups, mobile app, macOS apps.
| obeattie wrote:
| I think Notion might actually work best in personal/small
| environments, and this seems like a smart move to encourage more
| of that kind of use. My exposure to it is at a large company,
| where it really does not work well.
| scblzn wrote:
| I tried it around November 2019, really liked Notion and the
| UI/UX of the product for some note taking/personal knowledge
| base, however I had to contact their security team through their
| support because TLS 1.0 was still enabled at this time.
|
| They say they are audited by NCC (
| https://www.notion.so/Security-6c56b4854b624b0d8f36711018647... )
| but I don't know how NCC missed this. They disabled TLS 1.0 few
| days after my message.
|
| My second concern is that their .so domain is the TLD of Somalia
| (with all the risks it brings in case of malicious takeover), and
| .so zone doesn't even support DNSSEC, once again this is a big
| issue for me, especially for an app that hosts "personal data" (I
| see they also make calls on a .com domain, but the .so main
| domain issue still stands). Support told me they would change the
| domain in the future but still didn't happened.
|
| It's only my personal security stance/paranoia, but my 2 cents of
| what happened with them.
| tptacek wrote:
| Virtually no mainstream platforms enable DNSSEC (what's the
| largest one you can find? It won't be in the Moz 500); it's not
| as if there's a major competitor to Notion you'll find that is
| DNSSEC-signed. DNSSEC is moribund.
| yesion wrote:
| Valid points, as a customer I find that very concerning and I
| would like to hear their thoughts.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| When are we going to get dependency graphs?
|
| I want a ticket to be able to 'depend' on another ticket in a
| visually satisfying way like a dependency graph view.
|
| Dependencies are such a huge part of ticketing systems but they
| don't seem to be treated with first class attention.
| factsaresacred wrote:
| Still clinging onto OneNote 2016, the last version that allows
| you to store your data locally.
|
| There are some things - like personal notes - that really don't
| need to live in the cloud.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| I tried it a few months ago on Android. Almost impossible to use
| (for me) as the phone's back button makes the app close instead
| of, you know, going back to the previous screen
| jackson1442 wrote:
| This changes a lot for me. I like Notion's interface, as well as
| the functionality included. It _feels_ like a desktop app, which
| Google Docs simply can 't compete with (they're also Google
| products, do with that what you will). The "blocks" limit always
| felt arbitrary on Free, so I never really got into it, but now
| that I can use this like I would normally use a note-taking app,
| I can see it being very valuable.
|
| edit: apparently there's also a free upgrade to Personal Pro for
| EDU users, I wonder if that's been around for a while.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| free for edu users since Sep 2019.
| andreasley wrote:
| Accredited college or university only (e.g. no elementary or
| high schools). Also currently no discount for team plans.
| avolcano wrote:
| This is kinda weird, because I was happily giving them $4/month
| after running out of space in their trial plan, and now I
| absolutely have no reason to keep giving them money.
|
| Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to
| make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit
| about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my
| usage of their app doesn't align with their business model, which
| makes it feel rather... tenuous? Like at any time they might say
| "actually we're going to only support paid enterprise usage now"
| or "oh we're shutting down because companies just used Confluence
| and Airtable instead" (I have yet to sell any employer on using
| Notion because it's too unstructured for them to grok the
| benefits of :\\).
| gkoberger wrote:
| Github just did the same thing! It's because the math works
| like this: They'd need 1,000 people to pay them $4 to match a
| single enterprise company paying them $4k/mo. So they just need
| one of those 1,000 people to bring Notion into their company,
| and they're ahead. If they get 10, they're way ahead. (This is
| slightly simplified, of course)
| Lightbody wrote:
| The impressive thing here is that it's (sadly) pretty rare
| for a company to actively cease a revenue stream and think of
| the longer term benefits.
|
| GitHub and Notion are two recently examples, but for every
| one I see in the market, I can point to at least 10 that
| failed to take the obvious action.
| tnolet wrote:
| This is exactly how freemium in b2b SaaS works. The free plan
| is a marketing tool to drive awareness and adoption.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Don't overlook the importance of the economy. It's tough to
| get individual customers to pay $4/month for a service like
| this in a good economy. (They were already giving it away to
| academics, which will never be a lucrative market.) I
| wouldn't want to be selling Notion to individuals in an
| economy like this.
| jilles wrote:
| I never thought about it in this way, very interesting and
| super logical actually.
| omegadeep10 wrote:
| I too was happily paying for my personal plan.
|
| Recently they have been hiring aggressively and expanding their
| templates for specific use cases. Coming from a cynical HN
| perspective, this looks like another promising startup falling
| into the vicious cycle of using VC money to fund hyper growth.
|
| However their founder Ivan Zhao has been outspoken about not
| taking more VC money than necessary, and creating sustainable
| growth. So for now I'm approaching this news with cautious
| optimism.
| trynewideas wrote:
| Knowing their aversion to VC in their history, I had the
| opposite reaction -- this feels like a play to boost raw user
| count in order to attract an investor.
| keithwhor wrote:
| Notion just raised $50M. I don't think they need to boost
| anything to attract anybody.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-
| startup...
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| I share your cynicism on this. Good chance this is a play to
| drastically boost numbers to court a big company for an exit.
| Not a bad idea if that keeps the product alive since it seems
| to be very loved in the world of productivity apps.
|
| Also, I find it interesting that they're working on an API. A
| lot of organizing products lack integrations and this might
| open to door to sync items between Office, GSuite, fitness
| applications and other services for life management.
| machbio wrote:
| they might have ruined it for people paying for Notion Personal
|
| >> What if I had multiple members in my free workspace? No
| worries, you don't have to remove anyone! Nothing is different
| for you until you hit 1,000 blocks of content. At that point,
| if you want to add more, you can:
|
| Upgrade to our Team Plan. Start a new workspace for just
| yourself and use it for free, indefinitely. Remove members, and
| enjoy no content limits on your own. Note: Make sure members in
| your workspace have their private pages backed up before you
| remove them!
| iliaznk wrote:
| Got about the same feeling, but then I noticed that this free
| personal plan allows only 5mb of file uploads as opposed to the
| unlimited uploads in the paid plan, which is one of my use
| cases - I store quite a lot of files there as a personal
| software archive, and then I felt relieved.
| the-dude wrote:
| I assume this is on the frontpage because of the Microsoft
| announcements.
| nelaboras wrote:
| no they just anounced this today
| tinodotim wrote:
| Timing of the announcement isn't a coincidence though I'd
| guess.
| pacomerh wrote:
| Yeah, you might still have a reason though, if you upgrade to
| Personal Pro which gives you 30 days of version history
| ponker wrote:
| The flip side is that Evernote had a human-aligned business
| model and as a result never made enough money to compete with
| Microsoft OneNote.
| intopieces wrote:
| Are there any open source Notion alternatives? This is the main
| benefit of open source software, in my mind: no one can "take"
| it from you because it doesn't belong to "them" in the same way
| that a product does.
| tommoor wrote:
| Outline could be an alternative if your main usecase was
| internal team documentation. I understand that Notion can be
| used for a lot of other things too...
|
| It is BSL licensed, the only restriction is that you cannot
| run a hosted version for other organizations to use (aka
| compete with the only way the project maintains itself).
|
| https://www.getoutline.com/
| brnt wrote:
| I'm a happy user of QOwnNotes and Markor with a shared dir
| with a sync tool of your choice. Indeed, committing my data
| to a closed (source) silo is what prevents me from using
| tools like this (Notion does look very neat).
| madballster wrote:
| emacs + orgmode
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| MikeKusold wrote:
| Joplin or Bookstack are probably the closest. Joplin is
| closer to Evernote.
|
| https://joplinapp.org/
|
| https://www.bookstackapp.com/
| madballster wrote:
| Don't feel bad, they just got a major cash infusion from a VC
| firm. Looks like they figured those $4 a month individual users
| won't move their need much long term?
| clairity wrote:
| it's product as marketing: make happy individual users, in the
| target market, and you're likely to tell others, hopefully
| workmates or others like you. if you can get a workgroup using
| the product and happy with it, it's worth quite a bit more with
| their per-user subscription model for groups.
|
| it can work well for productivity apps, slack, for example.
| kuiro5 wrote:
| I'm long Notion. I've been using it since the beginning, and it's
| hard to beat its flexibility. I had a brief stint using plain
| markdown, but at the end of the day, most of the notes I'm taking
| are meant to be shared.
|
| Not sure if it's the rich formatting or customization, but I find
| myself coming back to notes and utilizing them much more
| frequently in Notion than I did with plain text.
|
| The latest releases have resolved some of my larger issues like
| performance, search, and quick notes on mobile. I'm happy they're
| making their product more accessible, and I'm looking forward to
| the API.
| aperrien wrote:
| Is there any way to export or backup Notion data to your own
| personal servers? I'd happily pay for a nice way to do that.
| input_sh wrote:
| In the settings, I see an option to export to HTML or Markdown
| + CSV, plus a PDF option (enterprise-only).
|
| I've just tried the HTML and it looks pretty good. CSS is at
| the beginning of each HTML and looks pretty similar to their
| light mode interface, no JavaScript gets loaded.
| careyrouse wrote:
| I don't think Notion is for everyone. One of the limitations that
| I've seen with products like Notion is permissions. They don't
| offer granular permissions for viewing and editing down to the
| column, row or cell level. That is one of the reasons why I
| created cloudternal.com.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I paid for Notion for a little over a year. Ultimately, though, I
| migrated to using Zim backed by Dropbox. I just didn't need the
| powerful features of Notion. I only needed a wiki with a desktop
| interface and cloud storage.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Anabella is a software engineer with a love for visual design.
| Her resume is a public page in Notion, making it viewable to the
| many hiring managers out there browsing the web (and others who
| might share).
|
| This is a weird testimonial. Any frontender should be making
| their own cool resume website, and not using a website generator!
| rammy1234 wrote:
| I use basecamp for my personal organization. calendar, to-dos and
| share with my spouse. Its perfect. It's intuitive and easy to
| use. why not basecamp ?
| machbio wrote:
| I use basecamp - but how do you do wiki, notes type of things
| in basecamp ?
| ak217 wrote:
| I'm interested in Notion, but I can't get over the fact that they
| use a Somalia TLD for their app. I'm just not sure why they have
| to use this TLD for what I assume is vanity purposes, and I think
| there are security implications to using it.
| TacoToni wrote:
| As a user of Apple Notes for personal and OneNote for work. What
| are the benefits of Notion - i have the app installed, but i
| always default to basic apple notes.
| salilpn12 wrote:
| I love apple notes for its simplicity too but I think it lacks
| a good search engine and taking down technical notes with code
| dashoffset wrote:
| Good news. But I've been using Roam [1] for a couple months and I
| don't know if I can live without "biderectional links" and
| "unliked references" anymore.
|
| [1] https://roamresearch.com/
| ggregoire wrote:
| _TL;DR_ for the people already paying $4 /month:
|
| You can downgrade to the free plan for which the number of blocks
| is not limited anymore, or keep paying paying $4/month for a
| bunch of extra features.
|
| From the FAQ: What if I'm already paying for
| the old Personal Plan? You've been automatically
| upgraded to our new Personal Pro Plan at no extra cost!
| In addition to all the features of the free Personal Plan,
| Personal Pro includes: - No limit on file uploads
| (5MB is the limit for free) - Unlimited guest
| collaborators (5 guests is the limit for free) -
| Version history up to 30 days - Priority customer
| support - API access (coming soon) You
| can switch back to the free Personal Plan at any time.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| Thx. Very helpful TL;DR. I'm particularly excited about the
| "API access (coming soon)" part.
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case
| of Notion? I have a friend that works at a small company who is
| absolutely _nuts_ about it (every single one of his tweets is
| about it), but I also have seen other people say it 's a
| convoluted mess once you get above a certain size and they regret
| ever going down that path.
|
| Also curious if anyone has comments on how it compares to similar
| apps like Dropbox Paper (which Notion seems like a direct clone
| of) or Quip.
| staysaasy wrote:
| Notion gives you a number of options for structuring data
| (tables, datatypes, formatting) and collaborating (great
| comment/tagging system + nice doc hierarchy). As a builder I
| have to say that it's a really nice product. The interaction
| design is _extremely_ good, but.....
|
| IMO the biggest issue with these sorts of better-mousetrap
| documents/business tools is that they add another application
| to your organization. They're almost all slightly better than
| Confluence/GSuite (and I say that as a GSuite fan), but my team
| already runs our SSO/Email etc through GSuite and our issue
| tracking through Jira. Even with better functionality,
| maintaining another tool can turn the value proposition
| negative for scaling companies due to time spent on enablement,
| vendor negotiation, change management, wrangling of docs,
| security, etc.
|
| Of course, these products like to sell/market via guerrilla,
| bottoms-up strategies propelled by their great design and
| natural appeal: the people introducing them to organizations
| are typically insulated from the negative logistical
| externalities. This allows them to dodge a top-down procurement
| process that would have much higher requirements. There's a
| whole organizational question of whether it's best for your
| company to accept new bottoms-up tools that incrementally
| improve efficiency, or accepting "worse" tools that simplify
| the overall logistics of running a team.
|
| Fwiw my team also used Dropbox Paper in the early days of the
| product, and the story then was quite similar to Notion (we
| weren't customers of Dropbox's storage product).
| ivan_ah wrote:
| The best way to understand notion is as a relational database.
| You can build arbitrary collections (tables) of "cards" and
| choose structured properties (columns) on them. The "body" of
| the card itself is a standard markdown note.
|
| The way you can display these cards is also very flexible
| (views): kanban, a table, list, gallery, etc with easy to setup
| filtering and sorting options. You can have multiple views
| attached to each collection (e.g. a KanBan board for team
| project managment and a separate "my TODOs" list)
|
| The most powerful part is when you start to setup relations
| (foreign keys) between tables, which allows you to use all the
| power of relational data using GUI point and click. Anyone
| familiar with SQL (or Django ORM) will feel right at home with
| Foreign key, and reverse relationships.
|
| The reason people are so excited about notion is that it
| "democratizes" the power of database -- to non-technical
| people.
| nojito wrote:
| >Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use
| case of Notion?
|
| There isn't one.
|
| Notion blasted the Youtube Selfhelp/Productivity space with
| sponsored videos to get a buzz going and now are moving to
| continue their growth story by offering a free tier.
|
| It's designed to convert your productivity into minuscule parts
| to convince you that you are achieving goals. Akin to playing a
| game.
| ebg13 wrote:
| > _Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition /use
| case of Notion?_
|
| Have you ever used Confluence? If not, have you ever used any
| Atlassian products? Atlassian is all over corp structures, and
| everything they make is painful to use without a training
| course or the desire to immerse yourself in boring-as-shit
| documentation. A lot of corps jumping onto Notion are jumping
| off of Confluence.
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| >Have you ever used Confluence?
|
| Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor?
|
| I guess I'm struggling to understand it because my
| aforementioned friend talks about how he uses Notion for
| basically every possible use case under the sun (probably
| even some where it's not meant for that but he found some way
| to finagle it). Based on that knowledge, I still don't really
| know what Notion is _meant_ for other than being just-
| another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-
| pics.
| ponker wrote:
| Notion is basically an app framework with a standardized UI
| surface and a couple of apps built in. So it's not
| surprising that your friend is using it for almost anything
| the same way you can use Ruby on Rails to build anything.
| edjrage wrote:
| I really don't mean to be rude, but why don't you just read
| their homepage (and the one posted here)? It should answer
| most of your questions. (Hint: It really is _way_ more than
| "just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-
| embedded-pics".)
|
| https://www.notion.so/
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| Because I have read their homepage (multiple times) and I
| find it to be nothing more than marketing speak that
| doesn't actually explain what it does or what it's good
| for, nor does it convey actual human experience using the
| product (which HN is excellent at discussing).
|
| "With Notion, all your work is in one place" is a
| terrible descriptor of a product.
| edjrage wrote:
| Uhh... Have you tried reading past that? They literally
| list pretty much all of the most important features right
| there (though I believe not all of them). They even show
| which services each feature replaces. It's true there is
| marketing speak sprinkled throughout it, but all in all
| it's the opposite of the "nothing but marketing speak"
| trend most services follow.
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| Yes. Here are some excerpts from the (very minimally
| descriptive) page:
|
| > Write better. Think more clearly. Get organized.
|
| Totally useless in terms of explaining what the product
| is.
|
| >A simple, beautiful writing experience, with 30+ types
| of content to add.
|
| Great, so I can... write things in it? What are these 30
| types of content? It doesn't even give examples.
|
| > Turn your tribal knowledge into easy-to-find answers.
|
| How does it do this? No explanation given.
|
| > Kanban boards, tables, lists, and more.
|
| "and more"? And more what? This is what I'm trying to get
| information on.
|
| > Lightweight and flexible.
|
| Flexible how? This phrase is meaningless to me.
|
| This is one of the more marketing speak ridden websites
| I've encountered.
|
| If someone made a post on HN asking people to compare and
| contrast, say, AWS vs Azure, would your response be "just
| go read the AWS website duh"?
|
| Take a look at the other comments in this thread and ask
| yourself if the Notion website conveys even half of the
| insight that the other commenters have provided. _Those_
| comments are the entire point of HN, not "just go read
| the website".
| edjrage wrote:
| I just read it again and it's true there's a lot of
| marketing speak, but it seems you've been blinded by it
| and ignored all of the rest.
|
| It's great to have these questions and insightful
| answers. The thing is you've said your friend is _nuts_
| about it, but apparently haven 't bothered to ask them
| the same questions you're asking here. Not only that, you
| do seem to be fairly interested in knowing what it's
| about, but you don't seem to have read anything about it
| at all, so maybe you could have at least followed the
| hacker spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links
| on the top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?
|
| https://www.notion.so/product
|
| https://www.notion.so/wikis (I've just seen you can even
| try a live demo without signing up)
|
| https://www.notion.so/projects
|
| https://www.notion.so/notes
|
| (There are more, but I believe you get the idea)
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| >so maybe you could have at least followed the hacker
| spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links on the
| top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?
|
| or I could ask about it on a forum that is dedicated to
| discussing topics exactly like this? As you can see,
| other commenters have given some great insight that is
| infinitely more helpful than "just go read the website",
| and is definitely more insightful than the website itself
| could ever be. I thank them greatly for their insight.
| edjrage wrote:
| To be clear, I didn't say you shouldn't have asked. I
| just suggested you inform yourself minimally before you
| do. I believe this is better for everyone involved, but
| ymmv.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I don't think it's especially great at note taking. I'd
| prefer a different directory structure for that.
|
| The love for it makes more sense if you think of it as a
| really simple website builder. You can have a database of
| pages with structured data, unstructured data, and nice
| layout. That sounds simple, but it covers a _lot_ of use
| cases.
|
| If you check out communities talking about Notion, you'll
| see the layout stuff is huge. You might even think it's
| overboard, to the point of productivity porn. But if you're
| the kind of person who cares about that (think the girl in
| middle school who took notes with 6 colored pens) or you
| want to make something pleasing to use for a tiny
| organization, you can end up falling in love with it.
| txcwpalpha wrote:
| >to the point of productivity porn
|
| I think this is what's mostly caused some confusion for
| me, so thanks for taking the time to explain it a bit.
| I've seen _tons_ of stuff about how to customize Notion
| to fit personal preferences and specific layouts, and
| that kind of drowns out the actual discussion about what
| those customizations /layouts are used to accomplish.
| ebg13 wrote:
| > _Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor?_
|
| Yes. I don't know why you're getting such convoluted
| answers from others.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| It doesn't really have very good integrations as of now.
| Like GitHub, GitLab issues etc.
| jotson wrote:
| It's a nice wiki with some interesting database features (a la
| airtable). Writing in it is pretty nice because it's basically
| markdown.
|
| I'd stopped using it because it was too easy to outgrow the
| free plan. Now with unlimited pages I'll give it another shot
| but I'm still not sold on its benefits vs storing all my notes
| locally in plain markdown files.
| Oarch wrote:
| I'd also recommend Gitbook. They've improved their search
| features recently and I'd say they're on a similar level to
| Notion.
|
| We used it for our company wiki. Wanted to use Notion but for
| 500 users the Notion quote came out 15x more expensive so it
| was a no-brainer!
| ggregoire wrote:
| I used Evernote for years and switched to Notion like 2 years
| ago. I use it on a daily basis, mainly to take/read notes at
| work and track articles/papers I've read, but also to track
| movies/series/books/games I've seen/read/played (the "database"
| template is great for that), track gym sessions and keep a
| grocery check list.
|
| While it's a good product (and now totally free), I don't
| really get why people are absolutely _nuts_ about it all over
| Twitter. There is also like a Notion community, organizing
| Notion meetups and events. That 's kinda beyond me. At the end
| of the day, it's just a note taking app.
| paulgb wrote:
| The killer feature that made me switch from OneNote is that
| when you add dates you can set it to remind you before they
| pass. Some ways I've used this:
|
| - Implementing GTD, when I move a task to "waiting" I add a
| date when I want to be reminded to check on it.
|
| - I create a new table quarterly with a row for each week with
| columns for goals (e.g. practice Spanish or get out running
| 3x), then embed date reminders for each one so I don't forget
| to keep it updated.
|
| - I keep a table of annual subscriptions I pay for, with the
| date the payment occurs, and a reminder a few weeks earlier.
| This way I can decide whether I want to renew (this alone has
| paid for the cost of Notion).
| muhammadusman wrote:
| Used Dropbox Paper before Notion. Paper is great for stand-
| alone documents. I even made a nice presentation using it
| because it was quicker than using Google Slides.
|
| I've been using Notion for 3+ years now and I've been happily
| paying for it. The main reason I went away from Dropbox for
| organizing and writing is b/c each Paper document felt like a
| separate piece of work. In Notion, documents are easily linked,
| workspaces are a starting point and there's child documents and
| sibling documents that can help keep things organized. I have
| over 200+ documents and about 3 months ago the search started
| to feel sluggish and they updated their search code and it now
| feels pretty fast again.
|
| It's not all perfect though, with 3+ years of use, I can tell
| you their mobile apps have come a long way but still don't feel
| as native as some other writing apps (iA Writer).
|
| My final thoughts are that if you're hearing good things about
| it and haven't given it a shot, try it for a 1-2 week period
| and see how it works for you. Some people like the way it does
| 90% of the things and others hate the same things [?]
| ezekg wrote:
| Notion's lack of 2FA, user roles, or the ability to enforce
| (only) Google OAuth makes it a non-starter for any real use cases
| in a tech company (ticket/task management, product planning,
| employee wiki, etc.). We wanted to use it, but their lax stance
| on security made us go elsewhere, even though the entire team
| loved the product as an all-in-one solution to product. I found
| an old conversation on Twitter dating back a couple years of
| Notion telling a customer that 2FA is on the roadmap, which was
| unfortunate.
| tzfld wrote:
| Is it only for me or the linked site is very slow? (Firefox)
| O_H_E wrote:
| Nope, also ff and molasses slow from 3 days ago.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Notion has similarities to a tool I created for my own personal
| note taking 6 years ago, I should turn it into a platform and
| release it.
| ericax wrote:
| Notion is great, I used to want to build my knowledge base in it,
| but figured it's not future-proof enough for my needs.
|
| And that's part of the reason we went on to build Obsidian
| (https://obsidian.md/), the local-first knowledge base app.
| Everything is in plain text Markdown.
|
| Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zof4zCj.png
|
| Just released 0.6.0 and here's a video for anyone interested:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAkJMHg-dGw
|
| The private beta community has built cool stuff already:
| https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian
|
| In private beta right now, looking to launch soon.
| rtisdale wrote:
| Nifty!
|
| I just placed in a beta request.
|
| A business partner and I heavily prefer to utilize markdown for
| note taking (we generally use Typora) but this poses problems
| when we are trying to colaborate on a document together.
|
| Does Obsidian support real time collaborative editing?
| ericax wrote:
| Thanks for the interest!
|
| Not yet, currently most of our users bring their own sync
| (Dropbox etc.), so if you edit the same document in real time
| that might create conflict copies.
|
| We're working on a sync service with end-to-end encryption
| (for convenience, completely optional), and we might improve
| it to support real-time collaboration in the future.
| tinodotim wrote:
| Will there also be an option for client-side encryption
| without using your sync service?
| ericax wrote:
| We might provide a plugin in the future to achieve this.
|
| Right now I think the closet thing is to use set up an
| encrypted folder with a third party app to use with
| Obsidian.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I've been using Obsidian. It's obviously still a work in
| progress, but it's pretty good already. The killer feature for
| me is that I don't need to put my data in someone else's cloud.
| Hoping for basic outlining features. That would make it a
| superapp.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| I like the idea of Notion, but one of things keeping me is that
| it seems like it'd be a pain to export one's data if Notion
| ever went out of business.
|
| But just keeping folders of Markdown notes is also inflexible,
| but on the opposite side of the scale.
|
| Obsidian looks like a great balance! I've requested beta access
| as well.
|
| Edit: Obsidian seems to make it easy to create a Zettelkasten,
| sort of like
| https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/zettelkasten.m...
| but with automation baked in.
| Yabood wrote:
| I mentioned this before. Notion is great, but the fact that they
| use fullstory (session recording) for a note taking app is a huge
| problem for me. We're talking about potentially sensitive data
| being available to notion and perhaps fullstory employees for the
| sake of improving UX. I especially dislike the fact that they
| don't disclose session recording upfront. I found out by
| inspecting their app webpage.
|
| Sure there's a way to opt out of fullstory in general, but that's
| not very reliable.
|
| I should mention that we use fullstory for our saas product and
| quite happy with it. However, our implementation makes it
| possible to opt out upfront during registration and or change
| your session recording settings from within our app. We don't
| rely on fullstory or bs workarounds, we simply don't load
| fullstory when you opt out.
| jamiequint wrote:
| Hi Yabood, we actually don't use Fullstory anymore due to
| privacy concerns. We removed it 6-9 months ago from all
| platforms. If you're still seeing this somewhere please let me
| know so we can address it.
| ciarannolan wrote:
| Does Notion have access to the content of my notes if they're
| compelled to produce them?
|
| Do employees have access to the content of my notes?
| jamiequint wrote:
| Notion employees are only allowed to access your workspace
| data with your written consent. We are also only allowed to
| do this in order to facilitate an improved user experience
| for you (e.g. debug problems you have asked support about,
| etc).
|
| We are working on updating our T&C and Privacy Policy to
| make this more clear, but it is rigorously practiced
| internally already.
|
| We do not yet have end-to-end encryption, or other
| encryption functionality that would make it technically
| impossible to access your data. We would love to do this at
| some point but it will be difficult because our permission
| model is quite complex!
| vageli wrote:
| > Notion employees are only allowed to access your
| workspace data with your written consent. We are also
| only allowed to do this in order to facilitate an
| improved user experience for you (e.g. debug problems you
| have asked support about, etc).
|
| Do you have technical controls in place to prevent this
| access, or is it more of a policy?
| ciarannolan wrote:
| Thanks for the reply, Jamie, much appreciated.
|
| I would definitely pay for an E2E encrypted Notion.
| jamiequint wrote:
| Thanks for raising the concern! We'd love to have that
| too at some point.
| fabiandesimone wrote:
| Yes they do. Read the T&C.
| ciarannolan wrote:
| Was hoping for an answer from someone at Notion rather
| than "read a 50 page legal document", but thanks.
| ambivalents wrote:
| Nice idea, but for better or worse I equate Notion with work. So,
| I would rather not be reminded of work when organizing my
| personal life.
| treve wrote:
| Notion would be a killer app for me if it used an open hypermedia
| protocol and the ability to run/link to my own endpoints.
| awill wrote:
| After Evernote started going downhill, I moved to plain markdown
| inside a Google Drive folder. I use the best, native app for each
| platform and have zero risk of being affected by a single company
| cancelling, closing,, increasing the price etc..
|
| Notion does seem pretty interesting, but if they ever shut, stop
| innovating, or are outshined by a competitor, I don't fancy the
| idea of moving everything
| skipnup wrote:
| Can you recommend a markdown native app for Windows? Currently
| switching to simple markdown notes myself but a bit annoyed
| always opening VS Code for a tiny note.
| Veen wrote:
| IA Writer has a Windows version.
| natemwilson wrote:
| Notable is great and open source.
|
| https://notable.md/
| robotblake wrote:
| According to https://github.com/notable/notable/blob/master
| /SOURCE_CODE.m... the current version is no longer open-
| source.
| awill wrote:
| On Mac I use Ulysses. I hate that they switched to a
| subscription, but it's still the best Markdown app on the
| platform.
|
| On Linux I use typora (previously caret when it basically
| shut down). typora and caret are built on web technologies
| and cross platform.
|
| Oh Android I used to use and recommend JotterPad, but they've
| disgraced themselves and moved previously paid features
| (which I bought!) to a subscription, so I don't have an
| Android app anymore :(.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| I've been happy with Markdown Edit. As a native app with an
| embedded webview, it's just a bit snappier than most of the
| Electron-based Markdown editors I've tried.
|
| https://mike-ward.net/Markdown-Edit/
| criddell wrote:
| How is Evernote going downhill?
|
| I'm not in love with it, but it works and I have a client
| everywhere I need one. It's text recognition in images is one
| of the killer features (I save snapshots of whiteboards), the
| other is searching metadata.
| arkitaip wrote:
| You aren't really missing much with Notion. It's over
| engineered and to easy to mess around with hours when you
| should be getting things done.
| unfunco wrote:
| Just you wait until Google sunsets Drive...
| taude wrote:
| easy to move your files to another cloud storage drive. OP
| was talking not being tied in at the software level.
| andreilys wrote:
| Agreed. I've been burned way too many times by companies being
| acquired (few months later product is sunset), shut down, or
| are forced to aggressively monetize.
| pier25 wrote:
| I've never used Notion before.
|
| So I signed up and after looking around for a minute or two I
| still have no idea what Notion is. It seems to be a way to create
| lists of rich to do items with dates?
|
| Can someone ELI5 Notion to me?
| arnvald wrote:
| Hi! Initially I had the same impression and my team had a hard
| time convincing me to give it a try. Since then I really
| started enjoying Notion though.
|
| So, what is notion? I'd call it a flexible on-line data
| organizer. Notion gives you a concept of pages (which then can
| have subpages) and blocks. A block can be a text, a table, a
| todo list, a calendar, an embedded Tweet etc.
|
| I think a good way to see what you can do with it is to use the
| templates - they are example pages that allow you to see what
| are Notion's capabilities.
|
| A few examples of what I've used Notion for:
|
| * tracking my job applications when I was looking for a new
| position
|
| * notes on resources I'm using for an online course I'm working
| on (I have a plan for lessons, each lesson has attached
| resources)
|
| * planning my holidays trip - it was a combination of todo
| list, map with our stops, list of hotels I booked etc.
|
| * todo list when moving to another country
|
| I've also seen it used as a team handbook, here's a public
| example by Blendle: https://www.notion.so/Blendle-s-Employee-
| Handbook-7692ffe24f...
| zerubeus wrote:
| How this replaces Google Drive the other time I can't upload a
| file larger than 4gb ?!
| marvinblum wrote:
| It's not a replacement for Drive as most note taking app are...
| well for note taking and not file storages. I would recommend
| to use Dropbox if you want both in one tool or separate those
| two use cases.
| lm2s wrote:
| Notion consuming 10-15% CPU while on idle is a deal breaker to
| me. I wish they'd devote a bit more resources to fix this.
|
| (On macOS, don't know if this is the case on other OSes)
| fabrika wrote:
| On iPadOS it ignores pointer and external keyboard. Wish their
| apps were more native to the platforms.
| lilyball wrote:
| It does? I keep Notion running but hidden on my Mac all day
| long and I haven't noticed this.
| input_sh wrote:
| I'm wondering how this impacts existing paying users. As far as I
| understand, by downgrading, we'd lose access to current 30-day
| revision history and access to an API that's still Coming
| Soon(tm).
|
| I guess it makes sense to downgrade until API is actually
| released. "Coming soon" messaging seems promising, but yet again,
| it's been on their priority list for at least half a year now.
| Seems hardly justified to spend another $30 or so waiting for it.
| nisuni wrote:
| If they only had a native Mac application.
|
| I love Notion, but the Mac client feels so sluggish, I didn't
| investigative but looks like a web view or Electron or something
| similar.
| andreasley wrote:
| Correct, it's Electron. And yes, I wish it were native, too.
| drukenemo wrote:
| I agree, too sluggish for me to bother.
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| I've been comparing Trello and Notion recently, and even though
| both use Electron, Trello feels infinitely faster.
|
| Trello can be toggled with a global hotkey with absolutely no
| delay, while re-opening the Notion window or loading another
| Notion page takes several seconds. It is a day and night
| difference for note taking.
| [deleted]
| troughway wrote:
| I wonder if this is a response to Microsoft's recent moves.
| mtmail wrote:
| Regarding the timing I'd say it's rather the $50m USD they got
| as investment in April.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| Last week, Notion leaked this pricing change accidentally on
| their dev instance. [0]
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186295
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Why does Notion not have a GitHub integration? Kind of a
| dealbreaker for using it on any tech team unless you just want a
| wiki.
| bauerd wrote:
| I wish there was a way to disable all the CSS transitions. Makes
| the UI feel unnecessarily laggy
| doctorbuttes wrote:
| Using Notion is awesome, but does require you to bring your own
| structure. Templates help, but much like any other process in
| your organization, it requires occasional review to keep the team
| on the same page to keep it tidy and useful. It helps to have a
| champion/steward for it.
| alacombe wrote:
| Worthwhile warning. While I'm not privy to all of the details,
| management was considering to make a complete move Notion but the
| whole plan for whipped due to privacy and data ownership /
| confidentiality concerns.
| andreilys wrote:
| I had a really bad experience with Notion, used it for some time,
| hit some arbitrary 1000 block limit that no matter what I deleted
| I couldn't get rid of.
|
| Now I rely on vimwiki and fzf. More robust and future-proof. Who
| knows how long Notion will be around?
| cristinacordova wrote:
| (Notion here) This update gets rid of of that exact block limit
| for personal use. We do hope and plan to be around for awhile.
| We're profitable and have raised money to ensure we're able to
| invest in the product for the long-term
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-
| startup...).
| TheGoodBarn wrote:
| I literally just bought 1 year of Personal Pro last week after
| running a little week long trial 2 weeks ago.
| ibdf wrote:
| Does Notion work offline?I tried Notion way back when they
| launched, but at the time I was not willing to pay for it. I then
| switched to Coda, which was free, but had awful offline
| capabilities. I then gave up for a while and just went back to
| google documents which loaded offline without any issues.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Not yet but it's on their roadmap.
| rbreve wrote:
| Notion is absolutely amazing, I love the /code snippet, the
| seamless sharing a page with a url and the UX. I hope Apple
| doesn't buy them.
| simzor wrote:
| Such a great tool - so glad I gave it a shot, which made me fall
| in love with it.
| ESTheComposer wrote:
| I'm not sure what it is, but I feel like HN seems to pick apart
| everything that's posted in a negative light. Honestly I
| discovered Notion a few years back and used it for a while, but
| stopped using it when I couldn't sync it with my teams project
| management software. Fast forward a few years and my SO and I
| were at a restaurant sitting next to a guy who's one of the early
| engineers in the company, and that sparked my interest again.
| Since then, I've been using Notion to replace Google Docs and
| Trello, and it's been fantastic
| vagab0nd wrote:
| Thanks. I'm going to give it a try. I currently use Trello to
| track my personal stuff. How does Notion compare?
| rockostrich wrote:
| I think Notion is a superset of Trello and because of that
| it's not as good at being a task tracker as Trello is, but it
| does so much more than task tracking that the benefits most
| likely outweigh any drawbacks.
|
| I'd recommend watching their office hours video for building
| things from scratch to see how powerful it is for personal
| use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1I3Hic0urY
| npunt wrote:
| Yeah this is part of what makes HN what it is. I'm not sure it
| could be any other way if its a community comprised of people
| building product for a living, who see the world as a mutable,
| and whose products tend to mostly be rehashes of prior products
| (not throwing shade, most products are just new takes on the
| same couple dozen ideas from 30 years ago).
|
| Most negative comments aren't mean-spirited, but they can verge
| on nitpicky. The worst type of comments are not those talking
| about product shortcomings, but are ones that veer way off
| topic into a commenter's pet point and kind of tank the whole
| discussion. Similarly, if everyone's just praising a product
| its not particularly constructive or helpful, except to know
| the product is going in the right direction. Good critique is
| super valuable.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| I think it's universal that any time there's a comments section
| on a website with at the very least a sort "air of
| intellectualism" (independent of whether the users are smart)
| the comments are generally going to be critical.
|
| This isn't necessarily because people who think they're smart
| are melancholic. I think it's because praise ultimately sounds
| the same in the end. Because it sounds the same, it doesn't
| sound smart, it doesn't get upvoted, you're better off just not
| posting it.
|
| On the other hand, you can sound smart and original with
| criticism if you word it right.
|
| Hence why I take the critical comments with a grain of salt and
| pay attention to the fact that the original HN post is on the
| front page with 256 points at the time of this writing. A lot
| of people clearly really like Notion.
| keithnz wrote:
| Not my experience of HN, it highlights both the positive and
| negatives. There is a lot of critical feedback, often from
| people who have built successful products, and it can be really
| useful for those trying to start/grow their product. For some
| people, Notion will hit a sweet spot, for others, it won't. I
| did an evaluation of it, and found it had a bunch of
| shortcomings for our development team and I sent my feedback to
| them.
| AnonC wrote:
| If I've understood it right, looking at the homepage and the FAQ,
| Notion is tied to its own cloud service for storing information,
| and there's no way to use it as a standalone app storing data
| locally and sync information through an unrelated service on my
| own (using, say, Dropbox for example)? If yes, then this is not
| for me.
| dive wrote:
| I tried the Notion twice. It looks good, works fine and has a
| reasonable price. But. You cannot write notes in this
| application. Literally. You can build tables, resize images,
| align lists in different shapes, have a dashboard for all
| thousand cases you have with favourites photos as headers, filter
| views with a million conditions, manage to-dos and project with
| kanban, ..., but you cannot write simple notes. The interface
| will fight you, mouse/trackpad are required in many cases, Enter
| key will produce different unexpected results...
|
| This is a good piece of software. But if you want to take simple
| linked notes, then you probably need something else.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Hey there, we've thought about that too and came up with a new
| user interface concept. Emvi [1] supports interlinked articles
| already and you can search through your notes easily. But we
| found the current user interface to inefficient for both,
| simple note taking and collaboration. You can read about our
| new concept here: https://emvi.com/blog/a-new-experimental-
| user-interface-QMZg...
|
| It will come out in about three weeks and we're always curious
| about feedback :)
|
| [1] https://emvi.com/
| Pmop wrote:
| What do you recommend (besides org mode, I don't use Emacs). I
| need something to write down ideas, store concepts I've
| learned, and at the same time has a Kanban board so I can
| track/manage progress of my side projects. Preferably,
| something that works offline. Preferably something open-source
| so I can rewire the thing to my needs.
| leoncvlt wrote:
| I use https://dynalist.io/ and enjoys its ease of us a lot -
| it is admittedly a glorified version of
| https://workflowy.com/, but while Workflowy invented the
| bullet-list web app formula, I find that it has stagnated in
| ideas for a while and I do like the little extra features
| Dynalist has.
| busrf wrote:
| Hmm, I primarily use Notion for notes, and for me I almost
| never need to leave my keyboard. I can write like I'm writing
| markdown and text formatting is rendered automatically, the /
| commands work very well and the keyboard focus works sanely (I
| can type /link, hit enter, search for a page, browse through
| results with my keyboard, hit enter, and get a link to that
| page, then press enter to get on to the next line).
|
| Can you be more specific about what doesn't work for you?
| rajekas wrote:
| I'm sad that so many of the top comments here are Notion
| skeptical. I have loved Notion from the very beginning and used
| it as a personal repository for a long time.
|
| More recently, we used Notion - where 'we' = a group of
| professional volunteers; professional in that everyone had skills
| to contribute and volunteer in that no one is being paid for
| those contributions - to create a Citizen-to-Citizen long term
| support platform for those impacted adversely by the COVID19
| epidemic. In India in case you're wondering.
|
| The challenges are many:
|
| 1. Make it clear that we see ourselves not as a charity but as a
| citizen to citizen support network - today it could be that
| person, but tomorrow it could be you. We have to design around
| the dignity of the recipient and the donor.
|
| 2. We need to identify potential beneficiaries whose needs are
| verifiable. Which means involving organizations that work with
| migrant laborers at scale (to take a key demographic) and can
| verify and on-board those potential beneficiaries.
|
| 3. We need to pull together the back-end and front-end technology
| to make donations without intermediaries, i.e., there's no
| middleman receiving and storing the money - it's a direct
| transfer from one individuals account to another individual's
| account. No administrative fees and with any luck we could even
| see if the credit card fees can be waived.
|
| 4. Compelling and easy to grasp design that inspires trust in
| potential donors and even more importantly, builds solidarity
| between the donor and the recipient. We are all in this together,
| aren't we?
|
| 5. A communications strategy that brings in donors and creates a
| democratic narrative around donations.
|
| Each one of these needs several individuals and sometimes several
| organizations to collaborate and agree upon a course of action.
| Notion helped us do that layer by layer, with the top level
| principles leading naturally to more technical decisions and an
| easy way to share content with non-technical but nevertheless
| insightful leaders in organizations that are providing essential
| services.
|
| We first tried doing it with a combination of Google docs, Github
| repositories and other pieces of chewing gum and string, but once
| we shifted to Notion we never looked back. So much so that the
| next project this group is attempting is Notion native.
| msrmthehomeless wrote:
| It's nice but I don't think my 2016 MBP can handle another
| electron on top of slack, VS code, Node, and chrome all at the
| same time.
| zwaps wrote:
| Question to web-devs: I am using firefox with ublock. Notion,
| like a few other pages, load only as blank for me.
|
| The only thing I have disabled are cookies and connections to
| trackers or ads. But cookies are not necessary to load a page.
| And adblocking is standard.
|
| Does anyone know the reason?
| O_H_E wrote:
| Notion was working a few days ago for me using firefox and
| ublock
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Do you have Privacy Badger running in firefox? It blocks
| hCaptcha, which Notion uses (unfortunately).
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