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Comment by ESTheComposer | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure what it is, but I feel like HN seems to pick apart everything that’s posted in a negative light. Honestly I discovered Notion a few years back and used it for a while, but stopped using it when I couldn’t sync it with my teams project management software. Fast forward a few years and my SO and I were at a restaurant sitting next to a guy who’s one of the early engineers in the company, and that sparked my interest again. Since then, I’ve been using Notion to replace Google Docs and Trello, and it’s been fantastic

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Yeah this is part of what makes HN what it is. I'm not sure it could be any other way if its a community comprised of people building product for a living, who see the world as a mutable, and whose products tend to mostly be rehashes of prior products (not throwing shade, most products are just new takes on the same couple dozen ideas from 30 years ago).

Most negative comments aren't mean-spirited, but they can verge on nitpicky. The worst type of comments are not those talking about product shortcomings, but are ones that veer way off topic into a commenter's pet point and kind of tank the whole discussion. Similarly, if everyone's just praising a product its not particularly constructive or helpful, except to know the product is going in the right direction. Good critique is super valuable.

I think it's universal that any time there's a comments section on a website with at the very least a sort "air of intellectualism" (independent of whether the users are smart) the comments are generally going to be critical.

This isn't necessarily because people who think they're smart are melancholic. I think it's because praise ultimately sounds the same in the end. Because it sounds the same, it doesn't sound smart, it doesn't get upvoted, you're better off just not posting it.

On the other hand, you can sound smart and original with criticism if you word it right.

Hence why I take the critical comments with a grain of salt and pay attention to the fact that the original HN post is on the front page with 256 points at the time of this writing. A lot of people clearly really like Notion.

Not my experience of HN, it highlights both the positive and negatives. There is a lot of critical feedback, often from people who have built successful products, and it can be really useful for those trying to start/grow their product. For some people, Notion will hit a sweet spot, for others, it won't. I did an evaluation of it, and found it had a bunch of shortcomings for our development team and I sent my feedback to them.

Thanks. I'm going to give it a try. I currently use Trello to track my personal stuff. How does Notion compare?

I think Notion is a superset of Trello and because of that it's not as good at being a task tracker as Trello is, but it does so much more than task tracking that the benefits most likely outweigh any drawbacks.

I'd recommend watching their office hours video for building things from scratch to see how powerful it is for personal use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1I3Hic0urY

I personally like the UX more, and it’s just a smoother experience for me than trello. Also what’s cool is we’ve divided up the Kanban boards so they’re separated by team, but they merge into a master board so we can see how everyone is doing at a glance. I also use it for tech designs writing documentation so, I need more than trello by default

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