Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

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> My bet is on Google Docs style,

Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion.

Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion".

I don't think that Microsoft should be worried about Notion. But things are different with Google Docs, which is really threaten by Notion. At the end of the day, most Google docs can be created in Notion without any difference, and I actually doubt Google docs will be able to evolve enough to prevent that.

The strongest advantage of Notion compared to Google docs is not its text editor but it is his list feature. And there are a lot of list porn people. When you have 10% of your workforce being "hardcore list porn people" and 90% of the others being "dont care people". Then it makes sense that the full organization goes closer and closer to Notion

EDIT: "porn list" -> "list porn"

I'm one of the original authors of Writely / Google Docs, and worked on relatively heavy-duty word processors in an earlier life.

I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage certain types of formatting from the keyboard), but a big thing for me is that Notion makes it a lot easier to manage multiple pages. Both the left-hand navigation list, and the ability to nest pages, are game changers when you're trying to manage a large collection of information.

Also Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to analyze why. And it seems like pages load faster, though I'm not sure whether this is literally true or just something about the experience makes it seem that way. Either way, it makes a difference.

As a word processor, Notion is still pretty immature. It's not very good at handling cross-block selections, using cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a dropped bullet, etc. There are a lot of little fit-and-finish touches that are table stakes for a mature word processor, but don't seem to be a focus for Notion. I'm hoping, but not confident, this will improve over time. Docs is better at this (ever since they threw away our our original hacky contenteditable code and built the entire editing experience in JavaScript), but that's not enough to make me switch back from Notion, just enough to make me wish Notion would put some energy into this.

> Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to analyze why.

There are fewer formatting options, but the options given are very opinionated. It is also really good at responsiveness to screen size.

I preferred notion initially, for many of the same reasons you outlined, but eventually I just couldn’t stand how slow notion is. Google Docs is so much faster.

I’m interested to try Google’s new tables product when I get a chance.

I had a similar feeling a while ago - but revisited Notion after a year or so and they've made a lot of speed improvements to it!

A couple of months ago, I got a Apple M1 and a lot of these electron apps load much snappier. (Slightly impractical fix)

Second this comment - notion would win for me hands down if it wasn't slow. Unfortunately I don't have the capital or desire to upgrade to an M1 to fix notion. So maybe when I eventually upgrade my system it will be my go to. Fingers crossed.

> cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a dropped bullet,

I'm not in the business but I did once spend two weeks of my life QA'ing just bulleted list copy-paste edge cases for a content-editable based WYSIWYG wiki editor and I would like that time back thank you very much.

For certain type of softwares, there is no fear of "not adopting". Text and document software is one of them. Every tool has their own offering and nothing makes them obsolete.

Let's say, text editors. In the last 2-3 years we have been told AI driven auto-complete or code companions will "disrupt" the entire experience of writing text and code. Before that we had the plugin saga of VSCode and Jetbrains and what not telling us more features means more convenience. Before that we had GUI and cursor based text editors that were simple to use. Before that we had VI and emacs.

But is there any kind disruption? Not really. People still like what the use and feel comfortable with. They don't need to switch environments but they can comfortably add features that they think is necessary. For people who are comfortable with Vi text editor the process is Vi > VIM > Neovim and not Vi > Notepad++ > VSCode > Github Copilot.

porn list?

I think GP's "porn list people" means "people who really like lists (as if lists are pornography to them)"; see meaning 3 and 4 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/porn#English.

I would say the other way around though, i.e. "list porn people".

Not OP, but thanks for clarifying. It's early this Friday morning and I was wondering why Notion worked well for "porn" lists.

1. Pornhub 2. Uh…

I hope they meant list porn and English isn’t their native tongue. In the sense of people who get pleasure from making lists. Porn list people would imply people who make lists of porn which doesn’t fit the context.

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