… the reason Notion has such a devoted fan base is its flexibility…
… Notion’s most devoted fans say they’re unlikely to jump ship to any other promising platforms anytime soon…
Is Notion so good, or is this product placement PR?
What I would say is that it's very versatile. It has almost Atlassian Jira levels of features (and arguably of bloat), and it's possible to reasonably organise a lot of thoughts/knowledge/tasks in a wide range of ways.
I think the reason why it's so popular and oft lauded is because the range of capability allows people to really engineer workflows and processes that work for them and that without the prompts of the examples that Notion and its community provide they may not otherwise arrive at.
So for me I'd probably say that the product itself is fairly good. It's far from flawless (e.g., it uses Electron), but does a solid job of a wide range of things. The killer differentiator against its competitors, however, is the library of templates and example projects - this initially was produced by Notion itself but then the community really grew, shared its own interpretations, and _productivity content creators_ really latched onto it as a good conduit for communicating workflows, processes, and systems for working/getting tasks done.
Still better than anything else on the market though.
Apple Notes is great for my own stuff — but good luck trying to get multiple collaborators to use it.
"If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all."
Fantastic way to understand a lot more of the world. Not just critical thinking, I have been making good progress in my interpersonal relationships too.