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Comment by huslage | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator. They gave it away to all of them. This is how you become popular with startups.

That's really gross. I guess then everyone thinks they need to use it because all these startups use it, but it's really just a simple notepad app with many alternatives.

I have no interest in defending Notion or anything but... have you actually used it? It's not even close to a "simple notepad app." I mean, that's what it started off as, and you can use it that way, but "simple notepad app" is ludicrously wrong.

Yep. And I've hated every second when I needed to write something with it. The editor of Notion is horrible, compared to Zed, Vim, Emacs et.al. The markdown import has been broken for years, and it is not easy to export your writeups for storage outside Notion

I'm really happy I got our company out from using Notion. We just do markdown in Linear, which you can copy and paste from an editor easily.

No, they use it because it was cheap and useful, and switching tools to something newer that's actually better has to not just be better, it has to be so much better as to justify the time and costs required to port a bulky knowledge base from one platform to another.

It's really just standard "voluntary lock-in": any knowledge system you decide to use locks you into that knowledge system simply because you're going to be generating tons of content in it, which may at some point need to be migrated, and the longer you use it the more of a hassle that'll be.

And if it feels a bit gross (it's not, really, it's just what happens when someone has a good sales pitch) they're not holding your content hostage like some other platforms *cough*zendesk*cough*.

Isn’t this exactly why accelerators like Y Combinator exist? To provide all the necessary things that aren’t your startup?

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