> Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion?
Have you ever used Confluence? If not, have you ever used any Atlassian products? Atlassian is all over corp structures, and everything they make is painful to use without a training course or the desire to immerse yourself in boring-as-shit documentation. A lot of corps jumping onto Notion are jumping off of Confluence.
I guess I'm struggling to understand it because my aforementioned friend talks about how he uses Notion for basically every possible use case under the sun (probably even some where it's not meant for that but he found some way to finagle it). Based on that knowledge, I still don't really know what Notion is meant for other than being just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics.
I don't think it's especially great at note taking. I'd prefer a different directory structure for that.
The love for it makes more sense if you think of it as a really simple website builder. You can have a database of pages with structured data, unstructured data, and nice layout. That sounds simple, but it covers a lot of use cases.
If you check out communities talking about Notion, you'll see the layout stuff is huge. You might even think it's overboard, to the point of productivity porn. But if you're the kind of person who cares about that (think the girl in middle school who took notes with 6 colored pens) or you want to make something pleasing to use for a tiny organization, you can end up falling in love with it.
I think this is what's mostly caused some confusion for me, so thanks for taking the time to explain it a bit. I've seen tons of stuff about how to customize Notion to fit personal preferences and specific layouts, and that kind of drowns out the actual discussion about what those customizations/layouts are used to accomplish.
I really don't mean to be rude, but why don't you just read their homepage (and the one posted here)? It should answer most of your questions. (Hint: It really is _way_ more than "just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics".)
Because I have read their homepage (multiple times) and I find it to be nothing more than marketing speak that doesn't actually explain what it does or what it's good for, nor does it convey actual human experience using the product (which HN is excellent at discussing).
"With Notion, all your work is in one place" is a terrible descriptor of a product.
Uhh... Have you tried reading past that? They literally list pretty much all of the most important features right there (though I believe not all of them). They even show which services each feature replaces. It's true there is marketing speak sprinkled throughout it, but all in all it's the opposite of the "nothing but marketing speak" trend most services follow.
Yes. Here are some excerpts from the (very minimally descriptive) page:
> Write better. Think more clearly. Get organized.
Totally useless in terms of explaining what the product is.
>A simple, beautiful writing experience,
with 30+ types of content to add.
Great, so I can... write things in it? What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.
> Turn your tribal knowledge into easy-to-find answers.
How does it do this? No explanation given.
> Kanban boards, tables, lists, and more.
"and more"? And more what? This is what I'm trying to get information on.
> Lightweight and flexible.
Flexible how? This phrase is meaningless to me.
This is one of the more marketing speak ridden websites I've encountered.
If someone made a post on HN asking people to compare and contrast, say, AWS vs Azure, would your response be "just go read the AWS website duh"?
Take a look at the other comments in this thread and ask yourself if the Notion website conveys even half of the insight that the other commenters have provided. Those comments are the entire point of HN, not "just go read the website".
I just read it again and it's true there's a lot of marketing speak, but it seems you've been blinded by it and ignored all of the rest.
It's great to have these questions and insightful answers. The thing is you've said your friend is nuts about it, but apparently haven't bothered to ask them the same questions you're asking here. Not only that, you do seem to be fairly interested in knowing what it's about, but you don't seem to have read anything about it at all, so maybe you could have at least followed the hacker spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links on the top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?
>so maybe you could have at least followed the hacker spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links on the top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?
or I could ask about it on a forum that is dedicated to discussing topics exactly like this? As you can see, other commenters have given some great insight that is infinitely more helpful than "just go read the website", and is definitely more insightful than the website itself could ever be. I thank them greatly for their insight.
To be clear, I didn't say you shouldn't have asked. I just suggested you inform yourself minimally before you do. I believe this is better for everyone involved, but ymmv.
I feel like you're nit-picking this to depth. Most of the answers you've mentioned may not exist on the homepage but within one click. Under the Product menu, there's a bunch more contextual detail.
I'm not sure why you would expect the main page to list, individually, 30+ types of content. Do you similarly complain that the homepage for Lightroom doesn't say that you can edit the following parameters on an image:
Or do you settle for "Wide ranging, comprehensive non-destructive image editing"?
> What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.
There are, just off the main page.
I'm just not sure what you're expecting is at all reasonable of any product. The main page draws you in, and the Product page breaks it down by use context. You're certainly entitled to "I don't want to have to go to any additional pages", but that doesn't work for anything more than the simplest products.
Notion is basically an app framework with a standardized UI surface and a couple of apps built in. So it’s not surprising that your friend is using it for almost anything the same way you can use Ruby on Rails to build anything.
Have you ever used Confluence? If not, have you ever used any Atlassian products? Atlassian is all over corp structures, and everything they make is painful to use without a training course or the desire to immerse yourself in boring-as-shit documentation. A lot of corps jumping onto Notion are jumping off of Confluence.