Notion AI – waiting list signup
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notion.so
That said, every implementation (including Notion's, which admittedly I haven't dug into very much) seems to be same stale "predict the next sentence" interaction, which reminds me very much of the early web's "it's like a store, but online!" vibe. In the sense of "I built this because it was straightforward to build" and not "I built this because I think it best meets what users need". To be fair, building the former can be a prerequisite to building the latter.
But honestly, most writing comes in editing; where is the help for editing? For rephrasing, or for making text flow more easily, or for reorganizing an outline and having the text update to reflect that higher-level reorganization? Where is the support for finding other text you've previously written that might be appropriate?
As someone who writes a lot (granted, in an academic setting), "first draft" is definitely part of the process, but it's just one piece! I suspect that in a few years today's tools will feel like ancient chisel-and-stone implements compared with what will come online. Can we get there already?
Current models can kind of do this, e.g. you could give some text to GPT-3 and ask it to do this. Not sure what the limit on the input length before results degraded would be. But yep, would be nice to see this out there in a nice interface and working well.
> Where is the support for finding other text you've previously written that might be appropriate?
Semantic search could be used for this, e.g. finding blocks of text similar to what you've already written
But yep, this stuff isn't all nicely packaged in one place
The editing process is a lot harder to build around than the more straightforward "continue this text for me". Partially because the models are really suited to do the latter out of the box, and partially because there's more nuance and subjectivity on the latter and it's harder to make it work well today.
That said, totally doable. (We put most of our effort into AI for human editing and control with Sudowrite.)
Can you elaborate on this particular point and how you would see it work in a collaborative doc/workspace?
Outlining is very underrated as a method of editing and organization, and most outliners are often designed for offline and personal use. I can see a lot of potential in adding automation to how you can organize and connect multiple nodes across outlines.
P.S. David Pierce wrote an in-depth review [1] with some interesting use cases. He was the one that originally broke Notion's story on WSJ a few years back.
Wasn't planning on making this public so soon (it's only been 2 weeks), but thought people here would be interested in checking it out. Got a lot of changes coming, so stay tuned! Happy to discuss at kevin[at]village.dev
I’ve been toying with the idea of making a browser extension that summarizes pages into ~5 bullets, <20 words each. And maybe a picture.
Someone please make this.
Too lazy to read walls of text. Too lazy to build the extension myself.
I imagine you just need to wrap that in a browser plug-in. Or maybe already exists.
Try for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming/ as an input to smmry - you don't get the idea
It would probably not be very hard to build a mediawiki smmrly extension that does just that.
https://www.summari.com/products/chrome
Etc etc
[looks like whatever you're writing has already been written in this workspace]
Of course no one will lay them off for that.
It literally is a SIMPLE fix, and I don't say that lightly. Since it's a web app you can just add a basic CSS media query for mobile devices to make the padding/sizing larger for mobile devices.
www.notion.so##.checkboxSquare:upward(2):style(width:30px !important; height:30px !important;)
www.notion.so##.check:upward(2):style(width:30px !important; height:30px !important;)This one should be promising!
I honestly think this is how we reach this "dead internet" meme. We're probably less than a decade away from this.
EDIT: here's my bold prediction. In the next 10 years, a very successful content aggregator (imagine Reddit, Instagram or Tiktok), where content is exclusively and openly AI generated, will reach the Alexa top 100 ranking.
We will have HN users saying we're too old and we just don't get why it is more fun to mindlessly get your dopamine fix from scrolling and liking AI generated images.
I argue that it is. Human content farms don't create long-form articles, artwork or deep fake videos by the truckload, in minutes, from just a little prompt. And humans are relatively expensive.
AI generated spam will be orders of magnitude cheaper, faster and thus incredibly more common.
This is where I see natural language AI causing a real kerfuffle. We're probably already reading bot spam articles without realizing.
This is clearly not actually using any process that could be called "AI" with a straight face since it's obviously just playing madlibs with different sets of vocabulary based on the scores and margins, but the results were invariably stupid and repetitive headlines and articles.
Are you suggesting that humans do not create spam too?
But humans create spam too!
A lot of the blog posts i read here are manually generated blogspam. These timelines these will converge, so i don't see a huge difference .
For the last month or so, on a daily basis, I have been getting the same spam messages (subject line: "You've been chosen”) in my inbox, often classified as important. No amount of reporting them as spam seem to help.
However, what ended up in my spam folder are emails from Amazon informing me about winning $100 in their sweepstakes. (When I found them it was too late to claim the prize as confirmed by Amazon's rep.)
I get that spam is hard, but weighing an account owner's signals more than other signals seems like a good strategy. (And if it is not, please do correct me!)
Is this for real?
Are you joking? Surely this is not something that exists.
I seem to be getting a spam email of this kind almost every day for the last ~6 months. Maybe the spammer found a way to prevent fingerprinting by Google and each batch of emails only gets automatically marked as spam after so many people manually mark it?
I expect search engines to be more like an AI assistant.
I don’t think Google can pull that off. Not because they don’t have the expertise for it (they do) but because their organisation is built around monetizing ads and an AI assistant might not work with it.
> I don’t think Google can pull that off.
Does Google Assistant not count? Searching for things with the assistant is certainly one of its main features.
Regardless, if the future of search is less a list of pages and more a set of focused, customized results, I can't see how Google will work in that context. Google, so far, has shown zero ability to monetize anything that can't be papered over with ads.
All the search results are from experts, and have been proofread and stuff. None are ad-supported, and very few are paid-placement.
Honestly it feels like "hollow, low-on-details content" hit the internet at least 5 years ago. Developments in indexing and searching have incentivized writing of low-quality content that makes it to the top of results, and here we are
But there are some work arounds: - Disabling inline title and setting the document title yourself with what ever characters - Using aliases (in the YAML front matter) so you can search a document with it's special character title, and auto-set a link's custom text
I understand the idea of cynical marketers wanting to use GPT-3 to churn out keyword nonsense to game Google Search.
But why would you want your employees reading/writing AI generated nonsense in your company's workspace?
In any case, since GPT-3 is open to everyone now, I think if you're building an AI copywriting tool (eg. Jasper and the 1,000+ others) you're going to have a rough go of it. It's now a commodity feature, not a standalone product.
As evidenced by this move from Notion, the GPT-3 API is just going to be bolted on as a feature in whatever tool you're already using.
- Offline mode. My data is mine, my tables, templates, notes, have no reason to live in your server.
- Improve performance. Notion is getting slower with every release.
- Full Text Workspace Search.
This are features customers actually want. Show some customer obsession and cut the crap with that GPT-3 non-sense. You are helping spammers to automate their workflow, on creating irrelevant posts that match search keys.We already have copy.ai and a ton of other services that do just that.
Maybe my tolerance level is high, or maybe my hardware is good, but actual performance is acceptable.
I do hope that Notion does improve offline mode. A single page works that is already loaded works wonderfully. Syncing has been non-problematic for me. I wonder why my phone and mac can't cache all the pages indefinitely, which would allow me to work completely offline.
Also, search needs work. Both search from the "search button" and the search that pops up when I type "@bla" are becoming less useful with each additional page in my workspace.
Finally, where are tags? Please please please add the ability to add ad-hoc tags to each block and page, the same way I can add comments to each block and page. And then give me the ability to view all tagged items as a kind of virtual page, or a type of database.
I'm at a point where I type things like tagIdeasToTry in the actual text and then use search to find all blocks that have that tag. But that requires mental effort, and fighting with the search functionality to get back results. I've even considered @mentioning special pages and then using backlinks as a way of categorizing content, but that only works at page level, and is clunky.
Notion, please help an addict get his fix.
I’m not aware of any block level tag though.
You can't use tags on pages that are not in a database.
Block-level tags would be a godsend.
Exactly, I can't remember a single time when AI-generated spam articles that you find on google search frontpage was useful
I couldn't agree more than I already do.
Without this "feature" I will never use Notion. Offline mode is a minimum for me to even look at such an information handling product.
You can sum up the whole blog post in one sentence.
Notion AI helps you be more productive by understanding your work habits and providing you with suggestions on how to improve them.
It writes like how I did when I was a kid in elementary school writing English papers lol.
Sounds like some next-gen Lorem Ipsum.
Here I thought that was a meta comment on the notion of AI.
I wouldn’t consider 3D printing played out, but I would say that it’s become more boring in the last few years. This is a good thing because it means that it’s being sustained by real work (e.g. medical, prototyping, micro-manufacturing) rather than hype.
I do agree that there was a hype phase, though, and the AI hype phase will probably be similar if not bigger.
The problem with AI text generation is that it does not have that real world context. A great example is the first example on this page: writing a blog post announcing Notion's AI generation.
The AI text generator does not know the feature set, and therefore either the content is going to lack any detail about the product, or it's going to have incorrect detail, in both cases providing no value.
What are use-cases for this that people will actually benefit from? Creative writing - sure. Brainstorming? Maybe for very vague and basic topics that don't need any business context. But more than that?
Let's take the example of the marketing brainstorming. Let's say you're a super organised small business and you write down a report on every marketing experiment you try, and influencer marketing didn't work for the product, so you write a report on why TikTok creators are not a good direction for marketing.
To know not to suggest influencer marketing, Notion needs to: have all your documents, know that document is relevant, have the "idea" (let's brush past the fact this was essentially written on someone else's brainstorming list and learnt from), know that the idea is related to that other document(s), know that the conclusion was negative sentiment in the way that matters, and then know that because it's doing brainstorming, lists of ideas should probably be filtered by things that haven't worked in the past.
Maybe it's not the worst thing if it generates "influencer marketing", but if you ask it for 5 and it always gives you the 5 you've done before, then you start having to engineer your way around its stupidity – give me 10 ideas, or give me 5 ideas that don't include xyz. Is it providing value over, say, googling "small business marketing ideas" and reading an article full of ads titled "Ten things that will transform your small business marketing". That's low value content, but it seems most likely to me that this will produce largely similar results.
I’ve seen copilot do some truly novel code synthesis, more than just matching up names. I’ve also seen GPT 3 generate compelling marketing copy and many other things so I’m admittedly biased in favor of potential solutions like this.
An h1 (or h2 I suppose) on the site is "Let Notion AI handle the first draft."
That makes sense! That's a lot easier than starting with a blank page.
Even if the AI is writing nonsense, you still benefit by virtue of Cunningham's Law.
I see your point, although I'm not certain I agree. It's very easy to read what we hope to see, especially when we know the topic, rather than what the text actually says. This is why proof reading is so hard for the author to do. Copilot has a similar issue, pushing more effort from code-authoring to code-review, which I'd suggest humans are probably worse at.
Looking at my Linkedin feed: lots of lazy people excited about possibility of "creating content" like "100 blog posts on a given topic in a minute". So, in short: seo spam. Lots of seo spam.
Who uses it? Mostly content marketers. GPT-3 is actually quite handy when writing because you can give it a rough outline of something and it can do a pretty good job making it sound good.
As for the lack of context, there's no fundamental reason you can't give these tools information to work off. In fact most of them ask you to.
I'm quite bullish on AI assisted writing - it feels like the internet in 94. For now no one understands it, but the fundamental value add is enormous.
In transit means https (like your comment getting sent to this page).
At rest means the underlying store uses a key, like S3, or even HDD encryption. It's encrypted on write to the disk, and decrypted on read. This may be fantastic for when nation state black ops sneak into the data center and remove the server's drives for forensic analysis, useless for anything else. (To be fair, it's useful on a laptop. Not so useful in a data center.)
Neither of these means it's encrypted between reading disk and sending over HTTPS.
Neither one means employees, servers, or clients, can't see your data.
I really liked notion as a product. This is kind of a wakeup call for me that using the cloud pretty much means giving up control - and not just theoretically.
Notion may, however, use your Content or Customer Data to improve and train Notion’s own models.
https://www.notion.so/Notion-AI-Program-Terms-c0066e30039041...
> Marvin from Product Operations here and happy to clarify. The answer you're looking for is: no we are not using your data to train our models.
"We do not and will not use your Content or Customer Data to improve or train our models unless you give us express permission to do so."
Maybe they changed this in the past 7 hours?
[0] https://www.notion.so/Privacy-Policy-3468d120cf614d4c9014c09...
I don't know if anyone even uses content-generating AIs like this for writing - but I'd be glad to change my mind by seeing some hard numbers. I mean, except for incomprehensible content-generated articles that pop up on searches only because of PageRank's flaws.
Everyone is building Mechanical Turks to nudge users to add artistic nuance AI lacks so far.
Personally I prefer using the libraries directly rather than gift my work to startups I’m also paying subscription fees to.
Startups are basically double dipping; let us train based on your behavior! …for $9.99/mo per user. Oh and we own the outcome!
Hoping to get some useful open models and data sets for game world generation soon!
That's said, the spell checker is nice and the translation would be helpful too.
Poems? Really?
For most bloggers, the hardest part of a creating a piece of content is starting it - staring at the blank screen. At best, they are using AI to jumpstart themselves, then they can flesh it out, rewrite, etc. Human nature being what it is though…
Overall, I think it is effective enough to be a complete disaster for the internet.
Will it go the way of 3D tvs? Interesting for 2 years then gone? We'll see.
Not to mention these companies are 100% training their "bot" with your data. Notion will learn from user's notes. Replit will learn from their new "bounty marketplace" they launched. Github from the repositories. Etc.
I get why it’s fun to make a system like this, but does it really never occur to anyone that no human wants to read AI generated copy?
That said, generative AI is a feature, that will go everywhere soon - it will be the next copy paste. If developers and product people are not careful, it will also invoke regulation that demands generated content to be labeled to remain legal (or you will loose the reader’s trust in your content).
Did it open in your Notion client when you clicked on it? Paste the url manually to your browser and it opens.
> Introducing Notion Al
> Notion Al: Your New Digital Assistant
> Introduction
> Notion Al is a new artificial intelligence feature from the productivity app Notion. Notion Al is designed to help you be more productive by understanding your work habits and providing suggestions on how to improve them. In this blog post, we'll introduce you to Notion Al and show you how it can help you get more out of your work.
> What is Notion Al?
> Notion Al is an artificial intelligence feature that is designed to help you be more productive. Notion Al uses machine learning to understand your work habits and provides suggestions on how to improve them. For example, if you tend to procrastinate on certain tasks, Notion Al will suggest ways to overcome that behavior
----
> Promotion Ideas
- Make a video showing all the features of Notion Al
- Create a blog post highlighting the benefits of using Notion Al
- Give a presentation to potential users about the advantages of Notion Al
- Reach out to social media influencers and ask them to try out Notion Al
- Give free trials to users who are interested in trying out the software
Notion recently opened up their entire API correct? This would leave a market for 3rd party clients that are snappier and innovation without having to leave the notion platform as a whole correct?
Full disclosure: I'd like to gauge interest in a product like this as I'm interested in working on solving it.
Are there other collaborative wiki products that implement your ideal “offline mode”?
And ideally, feature parity with Apple Notes, Google Keep, Evernote would be nice. But I would be thrilled just to get offline read-only access to everything.
and am I correct to assume the public API is the same API for functionality that notion itself uses or are there unexposed features that only the first party client gets?
That said, it wasn't too long ago that the writing style itself was easy to identify as AI-generated, or even borderline grammatically incorrect.
Notion AI does a pretty good job of mimicking an HR-level understanding of a topic. And that's progress.
I just wonder what it will take to get to a point when the output is of the quality I'd associate with human subject-expert writers who know how to engage with a reader.
I think people will quickly realize that poor AI-generated content is the new spam and we’ll see a surge of both algos and people prioritizing human-created content as a result.
Mem.ai recently raised $20M and they supposedly have AI-assisted writing but I haven’t tried it. But I think it’s really lame that even after all that money raised they still don’t support Math/Latex notation.
I started working on GPT3 integration for Notion [0]; but I guess that was obvious to have AI integrated in Notion.
The question is when will we get AI generated images in Notion? Well, then I can shut down my side project [1]
Notion turned 8 this year and it still doesn't have the aforementioned offline support, no repeating dates and events and no plugin support.
Why companies prioritise a product nobody asked for instead of features which a large majority of users are vocal in support of is beyond me. I can only hope a competitor will force them to shift their focus.
Less snidely, it's probably a lot more interesting to poke at AI integration than building another REST API. I bet there are more programmers putting their hand up to "explore that area" at the stand ups.
People love to work for developer focused companies with a lot of freedom, but in all honesty most paying users do not care in the slightest what you are interested to put your hand up for.
This is also almost certain to lead to more documents, not better ones, making the abysmal search experience worse.
The issue is that because a lot of non-technical people haven't played with GPT3 too much, there is huge initial engagement with these "features" so the stats around usage look great, even though anyone with a few brain cells can identify that the root cause of this is the novelty effect.
PMs also get the mistaken belief that, because writing is hard for most people, it must be a big blocker for these marketers. But for a marketer writing copy is like writing code for a seasoned dev. Similarly copilot is fun to play with, but I don't know any developers out there who seriously use it (save your replies I know some enthusiasts must exist). Additionally, unlike copilot, these GPT3 copy outputs always only look decent at first glance, but contains enough oddities that they are rarely if ever useful in their displayed form.
Expect floundering "AI" teams to churn this for out en mass at any remotely content related SaaS company for a while.
As of November 8, Notion supports recurring events in databases: https://www.notion.so/releases/2022-11-08
Curious what you think is missing from the API? https://developers.notion.com/reference/intro
while I like the "AI" part (the large language model), think it would be more interesting and productive to use same backend for full text semantic search & question answering or summarizations.
But it is cool to see Notion trying this way, kinda curious to see the results when so many people have access to this type of generative model.
Maybe the AI can fix it.
Also, GPT-3 completion is pretty hacky, and anyone who needs it on an information organization pipeline is not taking it seriously anyway.
The FAQ is unclear:
> Any information used to power Notion AI will be shared with our partners for the sole purpose of providing you with the Notion AI features. We do not allow any partners or 3rd parties to use your data for training their models, or any other purpose.
Together with Notaku [0] i can now create blog posts and help articles much faster, choosing Notion for my websites CMS was the right idea
Notion is solid app and idea and it would be a shame to became just one more thing that is just noise.
There have been some cool developments in AI recently, but it's just not free magic, and it might never be.
[0] https://twitter.com/notesnook/status/1591048432931975168 [1] https://twitter.com/notesnook/status/1588602471290572800
Are generative text models and image models cheap enough for consumer products or do you need to charge a premium?
It will either be zelensky or putin but that would in my opinion be a mistake
Nope, I'm out.
How about custom colors ? :(
I’m a big believer in AI as an accelerant for working, especially after playing with Stable Diffusion. But these examples are like almost wasting my time not making me work faster.
Based on the two examples I looked at on the posted page, one was a brainstorm ideas list for how to promote Notion AI which was fairly obvious. It did not include anything novel, just literally spit out what a quick Google search for “ideas to promote a new product” would have. I suppose you could say that it saves you the search but if you aren’t someone who understands promotion inherently then you’d need more info in the first place and if you are then this list is unnecessary as you’ll already have a promotion strategy in mind.
The second example was the AI writing a blog post introducing Notion AI. This is what I really referred to as a noise machine. The reason you need a blog post like that in 2022 is not for people to read but for Google’s indexer to read so that it gives your page and site all the points and you get better SEO. In other words the whole concept of this has gone off the rails where we have computers writing articles for other computers to read, which will ultimately be fed to another “AI” to learn from to write better articles for computers to read. Why are we perpetuating this circle jerk? Wouldn’t it be better to fix some core issues?
Lastly, I think the tech that allows you to turn a sentence or two into a coherent article is quite exciting. But I think this is somewhat the wrong application for it.
Particular in the corporate space, the problem of finding relevant knowledge (and keeping that knowledge up to date) is a really hard problem. I think competitors like Mem are going to eat Notion's lunch here (categorization and perhaps tagging of stale content is a much more reasonable application of ML than this).
... further, Notion's performance is so absolutely awful that my very small company had to stop using it. Latency is incredibly relevant to note taking and writing apps.
The marketing page example is also so contrived: "Write a blog post introducing Notion's new AI feature." How would the AI even know what that feature even is? Where's the context? It seems like this just proposes static solutions to dynamic problems.
This really is incredibly hard. A large fortune 500 company I worked for this summer had a whopping 35000 confluence pages. There is no navigating a knowledge base that vast. You couldn't even clean it up, because there was no way to know if someone would need some piece of fringe information on a rarely visited page any time in the future.
I wish we had a librarian on staff on my team to just keep data organized
The files can take up to three seconds to load at times, and seemingly caches nothing on my phone so when I want to look at my notes on the tube, I can't load it.
The filters and relations are so powerful and I really love the flexibility: example, “show only tasks linked to projects with an active status.” But when they keep disappearing and redrawing, I just feel slowed down in the app lately.
But there is no feature at all that could excite me about Notion now unless they fixed the performance first.
I stopped using it due to performance also.
that's what it looks like to me at least, I don't see anything here that 50 other generic GPT-3 tools don't already do. It's just embedded in Notion
Doesn't have to be revolutionary. It helps to be "in just 1 place"
In some cases that can work, but generally you want to massage the inputs and outputs a lot more than that.
The whole feature is kinda cynical in that it already kind of implies that because nobody will read it, you shouldn't put too much effort into writing it either.
This is EXACTLY what people in the corporate space need! AI to help them generate nonsense corporate-speak so they can get back to work!
Maybe ask the Google Docs team? They seem to have low latency online-first doc management figured out.
On the other hand, Notion wouldn't have full control anymore, usage stats might be hard to get when some users are offline, and so on, so unlikely Notion would do such a thing. Certainly their investors wouldn't like it either.
> Writing goes first into your local storage, then gets send to your remote storage
We do this already; writes are queued in SQLite or IndexedDB first and then asynchronously batched and streamed to the server. Our apps (Mac/Windows/iOS/Android) cache pages locally, and all platforms search a subset of documents locally in addition to server-side search. We’re actively improving this area as well.
I'm eagerly waiting for the day that I don't get frustrated with Notion's search. I'm not sure if I actually even bother with the search that much these days. I just try to drill down the page structure to find what looks relevant.
- models here: https://sbert.net/docs/pretrained_models.html
- fast vector search here: annoy, faiss, Milvus, Elastic, Pinecone
It's like the hello world of current day NLP.
Almost any self-hosted ANN library will do if you're dealing with <1M vectors, but the indexes at these note-based applications tend to balloon very quickly into the hundreds of millions and billions. Given the popularity of Notion I expect their number of (would-be) vectors to be monstrously big. That's where rolling your own gets painful (or downright not feasible) and where Pinecone shines.[1]
[1] https://www.pinecone.io - Disclosure: I work there.
- strip off all attachments --- these are archived on a central server w/ version control and links are passed around
- all e-mails are converted into threaded discussions in an hierarchical organization
Then, use an expert system to review and tag all messages and facilitate finding the correct forum thread/file.
"10 ways async communication is more productive" - alright, so you have an AI answering a leading question. Are you going to take the output as given and publish it as-is or spend time verifying and tweaking it? If you do the latter, how much productivity have you gained from rewriting a generated post compared to writing your own draft?
For automatic summarising and translating, okay cool, that really could be handy but this is almost commodity tech at this point.
I don't like my negative, pessimistic response here but I don't need tools that make it easier to write or create, I need them to keep things organised and up to date as you've mentioned. I need a better search that can help me find something that already exists, or actually point me to that article if I'm writing something that starts to look like a duplicate.
Can the AI say "this 'setting up the environment' post looks really similar to [some other setting up the environment post] which was written 6 months ago; is that what you're looking for/do you want to edit that?"
In my experience, AI providing the activation energy to get a first draft is highly valuable.
But more fundamentally, it sounds like you just don't believe the product works, which is fair, just not a very helpful comment. "How would the AI even know what that feature even is?" by learning about how its documented in the rest of Notion.
Fundamentally though, your comment has serious "Uber? No way that's going to work! Why would I get into a stranger's car?" vibes.
IMO, the most useful rejects were:
- Subscribe to a search query. Get an RSS-like digest of Slack messages, external document updates, CRM interactions, etc.
- Auto-responder I called "escal.ai," named after Slack's internal naming convention for help/support channels. These channels were prefixed with #escal-<subject>. I built a variation of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.05415.pdf to handle asymmetric retrieval tasks, where the answer to a question was typically a Slack post in another channel.
My gut says that every engineer they hired in the name of growth is trying to get their own little feature in to show impact. They prematurely scaled the company and it shows in the loss of focus.
So another lame one; I click on this article in iOS safari and it pops open my iOS Notion app saying ‘this content doesn’t exist’. Well done! I will add it to the list, in Notion.
It is the system with the highest popularity while also having the most bugs that I used in a long time. But not for long.
It is also slow; started using some similar (but less feature rich) products and things like Joplin are so nice and snappy that I tend to forget the missing features.
> started using some similar (but less feature rich) products
You may have answered your own question here.
At least in my experience, PMs at "feature rich" companies love to push for more new and exciting products (and what's more exciting than AI!?) and find it really annoying when devs talk about fixing bugs or improving existing processes for customers.
I'm really hoping one positive result from the current economic turmoil is a return to focusing on delivering value to customers. I remember in years long past when product people viewed solving a customers problem as the key path to a successful company. But I guess years of cheap money and forgetting about the very idea of profit have made people realize that the real customer is VCs.
I mean you can rebuild the essence of what Notion is with less than $1M. They don't need that money to build more features; I'm convinced that writing the code is the cheapest part of product development these days, despite developers earning five figure sums + bonuses + stock options + $15 / serving premade fruit smoothies from a squeezed bag.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/notion-so/company_fi...
It probably finds success in enterprise because it can replace a bunch of tools (confluence, jira, google docs, wikis) if you try really hard so maybe it makes financial sense. But in my experience it is not better than any of those in a 1:1 comparison. Okay, probably better than Confluence.
Rephrase the question as "what problems do you have which Notion is trying to solve, but you think there are better solutions on the market?".
Personally, I prefer plain-text where I own the content, so Obsidian works great. When I need to collaborate on something in realtime, I usually prefer a more focused tool, like Google Sheets, Trello, Excalidraw.
Note taking: Bear, Apple Notes, Obsidian
Project management: Jira, Linear, Height
Wikis: can't think of any
IMO the flexibility and feature set Notion offers makes it a jack of all trades, but master of none tool. Maybe the sum turns out to be greater than parts for some people but for personal use I haven't enjoyed it. Fwiw I felt the same way about Coda. So it's a general comment on this category of "all in one" doc tools.
Bear is really bad. The fact it uses some kind of Markdown but not really is insufferable. Can you even make proper tables in Bear now? It wasn't even possible for _years_
Apple Notes is good enough but doesn't support code blocks properly, that's a deal breaker for me. Also it can't really be shared with people not on iOS/macOS. It's also really bad for writing structured documents: you get 2 title levels, and you can't generate a table of contents.
I didn't fully try Obsidian because I didn't like its general UI. I really liked the graph philosophy it tries to push but couldn't make it work for my notes.
I love Notion because it makes it easy to organize lots of notes and has a good search feature. The databases are super useful, I have a bunch of them and I use the template buttons to auto-create new entries. I also use the template buttons to create new entries for my daily and weekly planning & review to make sure I check off all the things I need to do.
For example, I write blog posts on programming, startups, and mental health. I have a database with ideas for each of those three things. Then I have a centralized database where I link to those other databases so I can see which ideas I'm most inspired to write about in a centralized queue.
If you're interested in things like meal prep, using the gallery to show recipe idea pictures, then you can link a database of shopping needs to a database of meal ideas to automatically create shopping lists and meal prep ideas.
I acknowledge that some people have the opinion that you can spend too much time futzing with your tool and not doing the work enough. I respect that for some people something as powerful as Notion is a distraction. For me, my mind races and I take tons of notes and do tons of planning and I find Notion very helpful for organizing everything in a way Apple Notes could never be. I think people need to be respectful of differences on this topic.
I'm someone who's always hated Jira at work because I felt like we spent more time planning than doing work. But with Notion, I use it very quickly for the most part, there was a learning curve but it mostly just helps me out and stays out of my way. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing too, I like automatically adding different colors to my documents using them.
I do like Bear for Apple Watch and I still think Trello has a better mobile UX for boards/cards, so I take notes in those two apps then organize them into Notion. I also think it's funny Notion advertises habit tracking on their SF billboards since I think habit tracking is one of the only use cases Notion is terrible for (disclosure: I'm building what I consider to be the Notion of habit trackers).
But overall I think people are being incredibly uncharitable to Notion in this thread. Maybe it's a little overhyped, maybe performance could be better, maybe some people prefer more minimalist tools (my wife still likes pen/paper and whiteboards over all these things). But to me, Notion is still an incredibly well-designed tool that's incredibly powerful.
It has experienced hyper growth. It is what slack is to irc in some ways.
It’s far better than google docs, confluence and wikis. Jira doesn’t do it.
I’ve looked at many options, some more developer friendly. It’s the best right now.
Just after 3 months our notes have grown too complex to the point of it crawling every time we load a page - especially if there are more than 1 person on theh page. We ended up switching to Confluence + Google Docs (depending on the use cases). Notion definitely has a nice UX but for any meaningful large document it's utterly slow - that was 2.5 years ago so maybe they've improved but our contents are now stuck in JIRA and migrating out will take too much effort :)
But, in general still find Notion to be way better than other solutions for both taking down and rearranging information.
Re: Performance. I only use it in the browser after suffering from the Electron app. It's fast but I am also on an M1 Mac.
Also the ability to nest documents, insert tables that are easy to manage and again formatting is a solved issue.
That seems to be endorsing the exact behavior some users are complaining about with regards to Notion in this thread, leaving so many bugs unresolved while pushing new features.
It's about noting, saving, prioritizing, organizing every little thing. It's the "wake at 4am people, run for 30 min, meditate for 20min and drink quinoa juice" people. The ones that feel the need to be clockworks of effectiveness.
And of course, the more you automate something, it will start getting in the way after a certain point.
My “favourite” bug is that when you import a markdown document, if you have a piece of inline monospace text that starts with a hyphen, the hyphen will disappear. So, something like this:
Use the `-v` option to enable verbose mode.
> Use the v option to enable verbose mode.
A-a-and that's how you get a lot of confused people wondering, if your documentation just sucks.
- Sync across all devices
- Hierarchical notes
- Note-level sharing for collaboration
For collaboration I default to Google Docs instead.
After searching for a good note taking app for years, Notion has been life changing for me. Honestly the only 2 issues I have in mind are:
- the sidebar shows collapsing arrows even for pages with no subpages
- there's no way to open 2 pages side by side, so I have to open 2 windows and put them side by side
> It is also slow
It's... really not? Clicking on a page takes like 300ms to load, and once you're editing a page, there's nothing that can even be slow
But OP is right - it's so buggy. Every time I create a new page it says the page is in the trash. Every time.
The release of Teamspaces was sloppy at best.
Some basic computing functionality like highlighting and attempting to copy just doesn't work sometimes. It's so frustrating. If you accidentally grab the block and not the content, you're screwed.
There are also a bunch of usability issues. For instance, I want a DB but I don't want it to show in the sidebar.
Again, I agree, it's great, but it's full of bugs.
Create a new notion doc. Create a json formatted codeblock. Paste in the ~250 lines from https://gist.github.com/keeguon/2310008
Add a new made-up entry. Back-space it. Add it again.
I typed for ~10s to do that. It took notion _5 minutes_ to catch up to my typing. I am not making this number up.
Multiple minutes of lag between input and it rendering is the worst I have ever seen from any text editor.
This is for a ~250 line document, which is admittedly in a json codeblock... but still, 250 lines is nothing for a computer, how do you make it take 5 minutes to append a character to a ~9000 character string?
Of course, you'll say "nothing that can be slow" did not refer to codeblocks because everyone knows notion's codeblocks are unusably slow.
Codeblocks are the most striking example, but other things are slow. Let me give examples:
Time to type "cat" into the notion search box (from entering characters to it rendering the actual text) on a large notion workspace - 3.5s
Time for the search to complete for "cat" - 20s
Input lag for just typing regular text on a ~3000 line normal document - 350ms
350ms may not seem like a lot of input lag, but it is very noticeable to me. It causes me to make typos and generally makes notion feel bad to type in. No other webpage I use has input lag this bad.
Now, admittedly, that input lag isn't on every page for me, only about half the notion pages I edit are that bad, but it still makes me dread ever typing text into notion.
Note as well, this is not on an m1 macbook, just a 2 year old i7 (mobile) processor running firefox. Perhaps I need to upgrade my hardware so that I can run this particular text editor.
No, once you're editing a page, there's nothing that should even be slow. Big difference. I've found that if you have a page with more than a few hundred elements (i.e. if you have an outline for a book or something) then Notion becomes unbearably slow.
Also, if you type too fast on the mobile app, Notion will just straight up lose keystrokes. Like, for example, I'd type something like "afford", and what would show up was "a <pause> rd".
I wanted to build a culture of documentation in my organization, and asking many people to use an app dozens of times per day - performance matters!
We ended up with Slite and are very happy 3 years and 1,000 documents later.
Slite is not nearly as feature rich as Notion (and that's totally fine for us!), but it does what it needs too extremely well.
I will play the devil's advocate to myself though... I know people that love it. I'm just not one of them.
Disclaimer I'm the founder, hundreds of team come from notion every month for this reason. Our search is much more powerful and lightning fast, navigation and doc loading is super fast as well, we put extra care there.
This "limitless power of AI" (their words) addition to Notion is a great example. It's a kind of anti-compression.
* Ah, turns out this second feature has been baked into unix for decades. Most of the email I get and pages I am offered as output of a web search can be summarized using this handy shell command: `echo < /dev/null`
Perhaps I'm just a Luddite and the only idiot that's fighting against AI-generated content invading the Internet.
There are a limited number of ideas with consequence, and we used to read carefully written books about them (or at least some people did)
Now everyone just reads junk on the web that is recycled by computers from other sources, and quite often wrong
e.g. on nutrition, health, finance, etc. I even see it in my parents, who both got Ph.D.'s in the 1970's (when that kind of degree actually meant something). They don't read books, and read the web instead.
I learned this from business books: even the (incredibly tiny number of) good ones are mostly a few pages long. But you can't sell that in an airport, so they are expanded to the size where they can get a binding and go on a news stand shelf.
Really no different from the padding in clothes laundry to keep people from burning holes in their clothes.
Now when you add "AI" running on computers, it gets so much worse ...