[danpalmer]

This is a fun piece of creative writing, but I’m not quite sure of the point it’s trying to make about Notion. Is it that Notion is no longer cool? That might be true but isn’t the most insightful comment. Is it about Notion the company languishing in some way?

[staplers]

I used to use Notion daily. I switched to Anytype when Notion launched an AI tool that trains on your data.

A bit more of a learning curve but that's an absolute no-go when a tool contains the inner workings of my brain. Plenty of comparable private options.

Intellectual capital is rapidly being migrated from workers to shareholders under the guise of "AI".

Imagine a world where C-suites no longer rely on or support creative minds.

EDIT: They may say they don't train on user data currently but there's nothing stopping them in the future, especially if they are moving upmarket.

[jitl]

(I work at Notion but not on AI)

There’s far more for Notion to lose “training customer data on AI” than for Notion to gain. Like if an AI feature ever disclosed private information of one customer to another, that would be a huge blow to the company.

The closest thing to that that makes sense for us is building “learn to rank” style search models to improve search results, but this is not usually considered “AI” and is typical for any product trying to make search good.

[n_ary]

For me, it seems that most of the notion users in my circle(very small one) are non-technical people. Even if your AI vomits some other user’s private data, it’ll be considered a glitch and will be forgiven because non-technical users does not panic or gets flame-baited because these are irrelevant to them.

That being said, I appreciate that you understand the risk, and want to believe that the people on the helm of the AI feature and people on the leadership also share your opinion.

[jitl]

On the contrary if Notion were to regurgitate one company’s business development strategy notes to another company, that would be much worse than a technical documentation leak! In my experience non-technical data usually much more important to users than technical data, non-technical users are much less understanding, and our community keeps very close eye out for bugs, leaks, changes in privacy policy, etc.

[theshackleford]

> it seems that most of the notion users in my circle(very small one) are non-technical people.

All the users in my circle are the opposite, they are all technical individuals. Largely developers for whatever reason.

[staplers]

I appreciate the response but once you get investors and shareholders those concerns are worthless.

If it's possible, it will eventually happen.

[nunez]

You can turn Notion AI off in your tenant. It takes a few days, but support will do it. It's annoying that we have to ask instead of toggling a switch, but there you go.

[dcre]

Thanks for the Anytype rec. I have similarly been looking for a good alternative since they turned on AI features you can’t easily opt out of. And I’m not some anti-LLM zealot — I use them every day.

I’m not even worried about them training on user data. The more immediate problem is that if you accidentally type something in the Ask AI box (which is very easy to do because it looks like search), the page you’re on and god know what else is sent to god knows where. When I use LLMs, I like to know which one I’m using and exactly what I’m sending them.

I felt their AI integration was very cavalier and it completely changed my opinion of them as a company. On top of that, the YouTube and Tik Tok productivity grifters thrive on the ecosystem of template BS that Notion seems very happy to encourage. I guess they can’t help it but it is not my vibe. I also want something more stripped down and programmable. Obviously a programmer is not a typical consumer.

[jitl]

(I work at Notion but not on AI)

We maintain a list of data su processors here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Notion-s-List-of-Subprocessors-...

It’s not as specific as citing the actual model version in use from each vendor, though.

[light_hue_1]

That isn't reassuring at all. It's pretty much the worst case scenario. I don't want my private notes sent to places like openai who will use them to train models and who don't have any reasonable corporate governance. They have leaked customer data before.

And I'm not anti AI. I'm an ML researcher who uses LLMs all the time. But there's a big difference between that and revealing all my private information to them.

[dcre]

In their defense, in my phrasing, what is sent and to whom had equal weight. But you’re exactly right: obviously it is OpenAI and Anthropic. The private content being sent is the important part.

[Multicomp]

Notion is jumping the shark by moving from being a notes organization / mini database product to trying to compete with Salesforce and Hubspot. Just completely a different sector / product.

[anonygler]

This is an issue for all the low/no code tools. Every meaningful problem has a first class SaaS product that solves it well.

Notion/Retool/Airtable/Coda/Etc are fighting over a cursed long tail and their employees are slowly going insane trying to generalize asymptotic industries. The “AI” rebranding has no doubt made them want to put a gun in their mouths.

[arduinomancer]

I feel like that’s unavoidable because once you get big company clients your PMs start prioritizing their feature requests

And those companies will inevitably want it to do everything

[nunez]

I can see it.

I've been doing the sales engineer thing for a few years now. Salesforce management is a big part of my job, as this is what the salespeople use to track opportunities and deals.

The data that goes into SFDC is a big part of what gets reported on in sales/revenue forecasts, so it existing is extremely important and is a big reason why Marc Benioff has, like, a billion yachts.

At its core, SFDC is nothing more than a database and a shitload of plugins that enter stuff into that database.

Notion can, theoretically, do this as well.

Given how large the TAM is for revenue management software and how much Marc pays to acquire anything in his space, Notion chasing that market makes a lot of sense.

[muzani]

Often this happens when companies raising more funds when there are no funds available for that sector. Suddenly it's not cool to be a car rental company, they also need to become a logistics platform or bank.

[PaulHoule]

I imported a friend of mine's Notion into Fraxinus, some software I wrote that is a bookmark manager and a webcrawler and an image sorter and a search engine and annotation system and a visualization tool and is likely to get merged with my YOShInOn RSS reader and model trainer (might eat all my side projects that aren't about images and VR.) It's a tool for understanding, organizing and harvesting a collection of documents (so I got some insight into how he uses Notion.)

In his case, he uses it as a CRM for prospecting and it really isn't that bad at the business development end where you don't have a lot of people doing a structured process. But if you could somehow add some structure to notion, in the UI or with some AI interpretation of the text, or both, I could see Notion becoming a CRM or something else, think of something like a spreadsheet for notes.

Of course it might not be Notion that does it, it might be a startup that does it, it might be an established company. Saleforce is a good comparable because you can customize Salesforce to build many kinds of application but you still need programmers to do it. Is somebody in 2024 going to build a system which is as flexible, maybe even more flexible, but doesn't need the programmer?

[canadiantim]

Is there a way to try your Fraxinus system?

[sisyphus_coding]

Me too please :^)

[sanex]

It's middle aged and not exciting anymore? Doesn't know what else to do so it buys a sports car (adds AI). Just guessing but I know I am much less excited about notion than I was 4 years ago and maybe that's the point or maybe that's just how it resonated with me.