Every time I use notion I can feel the PMs working there under pressure to ship some arbitrary (more often than not "AI") feature each quarter to meet some arbitrary KPI set by leadership.

The base product was originally great: very smooth wysiwyg collaborative document editor with wiki-like linking. The problem is you don't need to do much on top of that. But clearly investors demand some "results" so PMs need to keep coming up with features that can be shipped in a quarter. Meanwhile bugs in the basic UX are plentiful.

Any really interesting work to improve the basic "collaborative document" experience is going to take time and experimentation, and I'm sure there's something to be found there. But the investor fueled focus on constantly doing something new and shiny means these really interesting spaces will never be explore and the product will continue to degrade with bloat each quarter.

It's really too bad. I looked at Notion pretty extensively not long after it launched and it seemed really good compared to tools like OneNote. I wasn't at a place where I could transition to it at the time but remembered it. Several years later when I was looking for new tooling, I looked at it again and was puzzled that it seemed kinda slow and convoluted.

It's unfortunate that it's an online service. At least with tools like OneNote, now that it's been screwed up with cloud, AI, etc we can still go back to the old perpetual license, local-first versions which are still great.

in which year was the Notion base product smooth? 2022 after buying a Mac Studio?

2018 when it was just a structured editor for wikis, with basic relational databases.

(Databases was, and still are, a bit half-baked but the thing was relatively fast & powerful vs say Confluence or Apple Notes)

That sounds like most of software engineering. After a product reaches maturity, very little feature development is actually needed. None of SAP's clients are asking for AI (yet we get Joule), nobody using Office wanted Copilot.

Meanwhile consumers have been asking for better Siri for ages, and that hasn't been delivered yet.

Notion's USP was always simplicity. Anyone could use it, anyone could find data in it, the lack of features was a selling point. But, as you say, the attitude changed at some point from aggressive simplicity to feature bloat and now AI slop.

Note taking is supposed to be a map of my brain. Not generated garbage from LLMs. I only want the most memorable things to be in there.

The app you're looking for is Obsidian. Notion abandoned that goal years ago. Notion is making money for being a project management / team wiki. They don't care personal note taking.

Notion is on its track to become the new Lotus Notes, just with notes instead of email memos.

"Notes and Domino is a cross-platform, distributed document-oriented NoSQL database and messaging framework and rapid application development environment that includes pre-built applications like email, calendar, etc." [0]

Lotus Notes was the original offline-first everything app, including cutting edge PKI and encryption. It worked over dial-up and needed only a handful of MBs of memory (before the Java rewrite at least). Has anything else really come close since?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes

But why would I want my team generating/reading AI slop in our Wiki??

You don't. Notion stakeholders do.

I've looked yesterday on replit. It used to be such a nice tool to play with various languages, be able to create a, say, python file, share it with students, etc.

Now you are welcomed by a "AI chat" that wants me to specify what a great application I want to create. Total madness...

I find that I get most value out of less memorable notes in my Obsidian, because for the more memorable ones my brain is able to stay on top of it.

I use LLMs to extract key points, make proposals or generate a short summary, but I personally want to manually be responsible for adding all this and I don't want my note taking tool to do this unsupervised in the background.

I was waiting for a linux client for such a long time. Or a way for api access where i do not need to poll for changes.

But instead more ai slop.

And thats not the worst. Every time when a company adds ai features, i know they want to train on my data sooner or later.

So hard pass for that one.

edit: seems like webhooks are here now. Will give them a try, but knowing notion, expect wild limitations

> Your Notion Agent tackles real work because it understands your work and can take action.

What on god's green earth sort of a line is this?

Well at least they didn't use AI to write that. SOTA LLMs might hallucinate but they won't write such a stupid line by default.

Feels like the placeholder blurb I type out quickly to get to the point before going back and editing in the real copy.

We have to use Notion at work, it's slow, bloated, and not a great UI experience overall. More bloat now I guess.

Forgive me for living in a cave, but is there any reason to use Notion if you don’t need the collaboration features? My experience with Notion on an M2 MacBook Air (8 GB RAM) is that it brings the machine to its knees.

It strikes me that if Notion is a nice wrapper for a database, and the agent is being tasked with interfacing with that wrapper, why not skip the wrapper entirely? If they’re trying to offload most of your interaction with the application to an LLM agent, it seems like it doesn’t matter where the data lives. So why not use a Claude Code agent to do the same things for you locally?

> is there any reason to use Notion if you don't need the collaboration features

I assume the alternative here is Obsidian.

It does have features that Obsidian doesn't have (like better URL preview). But it's mostly UI stuff. If you literally just want to manage some .md notes I'd say there isn't a reason to use Notion.

Also there’s ANYTYPE

Really wanted to go for this, as it's European, but they don't have good calendar support...

I really like the web experience of Notion. (In terms of looks and feels). And it's probably the only note-taking app I like that syncs across everything automagically.

It would've really helped if they worked on improving their subpar mobile apps, but instead they are focusing on AI features.

(Which, I don't see much incremental benefit in paying for separately, if I already pay for other AI subs like chatgpt).

It’s wild they do not talk about accountability features for the ai at all. I.e how do I even know if it has hallucinated if it can do anything anywhere in the workspace?

Rare occasion where beloved project doubled down on the wrong direction. Instead of a personal knowledge base it becomes a company's knowledge base with little to no effort in improving "singleplayer" experience.

Great reminder to export all Notion data to markdown and use a different tool.

Speaking about Notion, are there more developer-focused alternatives? I want to be able to write and sync Markdown. I would love to have something like Obsidian, but at the team level.

An Obsidian vault can be a Git repo. Obsidian recently launched data tables. Consider plugin security (supply chain attacks).

I looked into this last year. Obsidian is great but it's really not intended for a team. There's no permissions system, for example. There is a way to create a shared vault, but it's shared entirely or not at all. No way to share a single section or page.

We're using the Nextcloud Collectives app and it's great. It's like a very simplified version of Notion but where every page is a markdown file. There's also a full permissions/user system inherited from Nextcloud itself.

The only feature I miss from Notion is the ability to publically share a page so that people outside your team can read it. But that's not a big deal.

I guess Obsidian works in a similar way (markdown files) and would have more features, but there's no user permissions system. And it's closed source.

I use Zettlr. It just manages and indexes bare Mardkown files put on the disk. I keep my notes on Synology and that's all.

Here is my bold prediction - Microsoft will try acquire Notion within a year.

Notion seems have a lot of hype lately, and Microsoft tries to be king of the hill when it comes to productivity apps, buying tools encroaching upon their turf of Outlook and Excel (6 Wunderkinder, Yammer, Ally.io) or competing vigorously if they cant buy them (Teams). Seems like this Notion v3 could tip it over the edge into full blown productivity powerhouse.

> Here is my bold prediction - Microsoft will try acquire Notion within a year.

Microsoft do already have their own Notion ripoff/inspired product (Loop) though. It is a bit half-assed and the development pace is glacial so perhaps a new team behind it would be something they'd be interested in.

> It is a bit half-assed

A bit? The table views don't even handle sorting from either a persistence or collaborative perspective. If you want to sort a table, do it yourself.

Notion's competitor Coda was acquired by grammarly a year ago! It was surprising because the two markets don't overlap at all - but then it makes sense when I realized all data in Notion/Coda/etc are just food for AI companies.

So I won't be surprised if OpenAI or Anthropic or some AI company buys Notion and makes it their playground to launch AI capabilities.

I don't think there's anything Notion has that Microsoft wants.

They would want the user base, i.e. those who has gone out of their way to pick something different, than Microsoft/Atlassian, like Notion

It's got to be pretty small and not the right customer base for Microsoft.

Despite Slack's presence in the startup space, Teams dominates the market (fair play or not different story).

I'm not sure I buy Microsoft being that interested in Notion's customer base.

They are doing loop, so there's something there, however small

Wunderlist 2.0

I have entirely no clue about how other folks are using Notion .... but, errr – how exactly is this supposed to help me, or work at all?

How could the AI possibly know what I want to put in? The whole point of note taking and ordering and rearranging data is that I have the control over it. And by that a better understanding.

Dear Notion employees, please, if you're advertise mail and calendar as features, add them into your app and do not make them open in new tabs. I want an all in one thing, why is that so hard, you already have tabs built in? Thanks!

I'm pretty convinced that Notion is where information and documents go to die.

This is what I mostly want. I want to keep track of things and when I have half done the work I want to note that and split the to-do and things like that. I want to say things to notes and have it write it down like me. I use Reminders app with my wife and use LLM to manage it. This would make me end up using Notion for personal life perhaps, but it has to be good. Problem with first-party agent is that I'm stuck with garbage agent because either:

* they have decided to "have our own model" (always garbage model)

* they have decided to "collaborate with X" (and this model rapidly gets outdated)

A question for people who interact with non-trivial Notion documents: Have they fixed the sluggishness? Some people I've talked to say that Notion has made massive improvements in that direction, and that slowness is no longer an issue. I also hear a lot of complaints online. Perhaps their native apps are fast and webapp is slow?

I'd love to hear your informed take on this.

If it really is slow, how is it so successful?

I use it for personal notes, nothing complex just bullet point lists.

Every few months I have to split up pages and move stuff to archive because it becomes unusably slow. When I open the mobile app to write a quick note it's just frozen for several seconds, recent edits are not synced and so on.

Yes I should switch to something else but haven't found solution I like yet.

they have not

"For example, tell it to “compile customer feedback from Slack, Notion, and email into actionable insights” and watch it research across your tools, synthesize findings, create a structured database, then notify you when it’s done."

I wonder when for the first time a team of humans will complete a full project based on a finding that turned out to be hallucinated in a sub step of an AI agent.

Millions have been squandered on some PM getting a hunch from a single customer's quote.

I was forced to use Notion for a couple of months at work. One Big Mess.

I prefer one tool for one job approach.

Could someone please explain benefits of using one-does-all tools?

It always was, but the reason it was successful is because it was good at it. The last two years have been a hot mess of them cramming shit in, an attempt to be "sticky". The thoughtful approach they used to take is gone.

It used to be simpler and focused on capturing text. Slowly they turned into an alternative to Confluence, Trello, Jira, ChatGPT's UI, ad infinitum.

Most people got hooked before it was that convoluted.

I’d rather have better file/media management in the API. Speaking as someone that lives AI and uses it for everything.

At least better file management in the app itself. Like when I'm in the application and I click on a file I do not want a browser window to open to download a file. I do not want Notion to make a mess out of my Downloads folder

> with Notion AI Agents at the center.

Oh dear, more AI slop that's going to try to force itself on you, like a creepy uncle at a party. This "agents" thing seems to be a meaningless buzzword that every product must now use. I'd rather they focused on polishing the product or left it as it is, not contaminating it with trash that just gets in the way.

Does anyone know of any decent Notion alternative ? Something Much Simpler but also hosted online.

Anytype is a great alternative. You can use it in its simple form or design your own workflows with custom document types and properties. In Notion everything is a page but in Anytype you can define document types like Research Note, Concept, Bug Report,.. to distinguish between the various types of pages we typically use to organize information in a space. It's also fully e2e encrypted so you do not have to worry about them using your information to train models. It supports multiple devices and can sync between them p2p while maintaining a hosted server copy but does not have a webapp.

Thanks I will take a look into it.

Check out my Journal it! app if you want something local first, offline first and don't need collaboration features.

https://apps.apple.com/US/app/id1501944799

My installed Notion version appears to be 4.20.0 so presumably I am a visitor from the future sent back to warn you all that Notion will continue to be slow and clunky and full of AI shit nobody wants.

Plugging notesnook- it's in between notion and obsidian and doesn't steal your data

What does it give you that Obsidian can't?

Better chapter style organisation and easier formatting- and the style is better for life/academic planning for me whereas obsidian is more for writing/personal wiki type things for me

None of the demo videos play on Firefox.

... How about fixing basic things like the cursor position in code blocks, and being able to select text on mobile, instead of unnecessary "AI Agents"?

Or is the frontend now supposedly obsolete since all the work will be done by "AI"?