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Comment by emptysongglass | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry to hijack the thread but as someone forced to use Notion as a team wiki, please improve the performance! I can't emphasize this enough. The Notion subreddit is filled with complaints: if that's not a wake up call to every single PM at Notion, I don't know what is.

Stop shipping features until the perf is a joy to your users. It's mind-boggling to me that companies would prio anything over fixing perf outside of fixing bugs.

Notion is the single biggest frustration of any workplace tool I've ever used in my entire software career and it all comes down to its performance.

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They could try the WebKit strategy [1]; a strict policy against performance regression:

> We adhere to a simple directive for all work we do on WebKit: The way to make a program faster is to never let it get slower.

[1]: https://webkit.org/performance/

> Notion is the single biggest frustration of any workplace tool I've ever used in my entire software career and it all comes down to its performance.

Even worse than JIRA, or MS Teams? That sounds horrible indeed.

Not in my experience. Notion is faster than Jira. But we don't have super massive wikis, hundreds of pages at most.

Yes, worse but it depends on what type of page you're working in. If it's of medium complexity and up, it's worse (a few media elements, maybe a database, etc.)

If it's just text, it's faster than JIRA or Teams.

I have the same problem, I understand the enjoyment of sales / marketing team when it comes to using Notion, but for engineering team, it's just horrible, so slow.

I can vouch for it being worse than JIRA, which I was absolutely not prepared for when I moved to a company that uses Notion for its ticketing system.

I went from being a notion advocate to a hater. Perf, mobile apps, and pricing weirdness have just made it clear it's no longer a high quality product but another enterprise-y Jira type product.

The early notion product was really performant, the mobile apps were ok enough and it had good ideas.

Now my last remaining notion sites sit on my to do list to be migrated to an alternative. The mobile apps are trash. Working with notion is painful.

What is your alternative?

Most things moved into Obsidian with databases that needed to stay databases (versus tables) going into NocoDB (an airtable clone that can use sqlite).

I still haven't found a replacement for "online thing that anyone can edit easily". Some wiki systems are close but I don't want to give up some of the richer component types like kanban cards.

Notion is definitely quite slow

But I also think a lot of companies in the same stage as Notion have fallen into the trap of shipping features (namely AI features) ahead of fixing perf bugs

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36799739.

yeah i hate the slow perf too, but their success in the market unfortunately i think validates the "features over perf" strategy

(also, as slow as it is now, it's MUCH faster than it used to be, if you can imagine that!)

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