Guide to Notion Landing Pages | Hacker News Reader

Guide to Notion Landing Pages

optemization.com

56 pointssaviorand27 comments

The biggest problem with Notion IMO is the overuse of Emojis in written documentation. It serves little purpose unlike in conversations to convey emotions; here they’re primarily used as a decorative element. It’s the same in a lot of Javascript library docs on GitHub. Is it fine for a scrap book? Sure. I strongly believe it has no place in professional documentation or pretty much anywhere else.

Notion is perpetuating this idea that it’s cute to put distracting colorful symbols in text.

Actually, I disagree with your idea that emojis are distracting or not useful in documentation/page titles. I actually really like them, because if you use them well, they can be helpful for visually parsing through a bunch of pages quickly. You can use them as kind of "categories" (e.g.: :ladybug: for pages/database items that are about bugs) or to delineate which pages in a set of them are for different things while having to look at the least amount of information. (e.g.: :tear-off calendar: for calendar/todos/meetings, :desktop computer: for technical articles maybe, etc.)

Emojis that are more for adding flavor to conversations would be more stuff like: :shrug:, :thumbs up:, or :D. Though even there the thumbs up could potentially be used as a quick signal of approval in some way in tickets or documentation or whatever else. Visual aids are honestly great! I think they should be embraced more, though not going too far because little aids are helpful but tons and tons of stuff all over the place can get messy. As with pretty much everything, moderation is extremely helpful.

EDIT: HN seems to have eaten my emojis? Adding in text bits to the original post to indicate what I was trying to use.

If that's the biggest problem, things must be going pretty well.

Lol, touche. I feel like this problem goes beyond Notion and it is propagating like a meme throughout the developer communities.

I find them useful. On this page, for example, they are the equivalent of SVG icons.

This allowed me to rapidly scroll to the bottom of the page and parse the topics instantly in my head. Especially since they had a "legend" at the beginning in the overview section.

It's not as if they add :) and :P everywhere. They simply made the choice to skip custom icons that every single sites out there use and instead use a common set of icons (emojis).

As more and more apps and service use those, this make parsing those page very quick. I know that if I see a "globe with meridians" emoji, it's going to be about the internet, etc. That way, you don't have to learn a new set of icons for every site you go to.

A counterpoint: what if emojis are an evolution of our written language? It used to be time-consuming to draw complex, colorful characters onto paper, so our written language evolved away from them (although, some pictogram-based languages did emerge, 日本語, 中文). But with computer text, suddenly emojis are much cheaper to write, and are given consistent definitions. On top of that they can convey information in a way text can't. Am I crazy to expect them to take a bigger part in 'standard' digital communication?

My biggest gripe with Notion is how much is hidden behind hover states and how easy it is to change something without knowing. Seems to be a trend with productivity apps these days.

The biggest problem with Notion IMO is the overuse of Emojis in written documentation.

You could probably hide them using a client side script like Stylish.

What is the harm?

Well, when reading running text they are a distraction. They aren't parsed by the same part of your brain that parses text, and they require interpretation (and embody ambiguity). They are like the junk photo required by Medium for each post, only scattered through the text.

I happily use emojis when sending texts, making FB posts and the like, but I wouldn't put one in a comment here even if HN supported them.

I don't care about the "professional" aspect the OP mentioned, simply that they are cognitive junk that get in the way of reading a document.

That said, I also agree with the comment by camdez parallel to yours: "If that's the biggest problem, things must be going pretty well."

Can anyone else give me some good recommendation for other company wiki software. I'm especially looking for something for a non-technically audience.

This is something we wrote at decent length about in the past — let me know if this is helpful for your use case.

https://satchel.com/knowledge-base/

I haven't tested it personally, but I trust those people enough to take a closer look: https://clubhouse.io/write-beta/

Outline is really good, and can be self-hosted.

https://www.getoutline.com/

Wish I could self-host Notion. A thing that's missing right now. But I'm OK knowing I can always export to Markdown and move to another tool

For a basic company wiki Nuclino is another option. It doesn't have all the features Notion does, but I loved the incredibly fast page loads and search. Notion feels pretty sluggish by comparison.

If it’s for documentation, BookStack is fantastic and user friendly.

I know Notebag and Obsidian - both are more open-source, Obsidian is almost like a layer on top of your Markdown content you can leave in the file storage

Notebag isn't open-source https://alternativeto.net/software/notebag/

As the guy who made it: Since yesterday it is. Not that it’s a particularly shiny piece of code to look at

https://github.com/pretzelhands/notebag

Hahaha! Yeah, awesome! Woohoo

Oh, right, sorry. Reached out to founder about the fact! Wish it was open-source

We've been using Slite for a while; it's pretty great.

Confluence works but it's a bit of a beast in multiple ways.

Slab is very nice

I didn't even know you could create sites with notion...

Yes you can! And the best thing is you can draw data from your Notion workspace. If you're an active Notion user that means a different dimension compared to usual websites, which you need to update separately. This can just work as a set of public-facing pages for your own company or personal workspace.

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