I am an independent developer based currently in Japan. I work in business intelligence with a gratis role in a national environmental conservation organization. I have no affiliation to Notion. I have used their product for last two years and generally enjoy the productivity boost. I used to be a premium Evernote customer a few years ago.

Hope that clears the matter with you. Please understand that regular HN contributors do not generally engage being paid shill or voting ring members. Some of us happily choose the dignity here over the chaos in paid social media.

From the HN commenting guidelines:

>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html*

Yeah, that kind of died the day this was published:

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/corporate-market...

Gitlab said out loud what we were all thinking: companies have automation in place to follow big communities such as HN and notify their developer evangelists and marketing teams and have them reply and create "buzz". Aka, shills :-)

There's a difference between people paid to post positive things about a project whenever it's mentioned and people paid to communicate about a project. One is shilling, the other is... communicating about a project. There's a difference and saying they're the same thing is quite cynic.

They should probably be transparent about it in latter case though (which they aren’t always)

Do you think that people should be banned from commenting on things they work on? Seems counterproductive to me.

No. But they should be transparent about it. Which they have an incentive to not be, since at this point we're talking about real money.

It's weird to suggest something like that when Notion has a rapidly growing user base.

It's a great app and has a lot of things going right for it. They are building a platform for others to also share their customized pages/databases. Tons of templates and resources to learn how to effectively use the tool.

You can try to draw comparisons but I think they and Figma are very innovative products growing in similar ways.

HN is the target of a ton of marketing groups. They have alerts set up for keywords.

Oh yes. And OKRs on engagement.

Notion has a strangely huge and fanatic fan base so it's not surprising

It's like a cult

Eh, it's just a good product. As soon as it becomes shit, expect everyone to jump on the next product.

Just like people who used to like evernote, but not any more.

I never said anything about the product being good or bad. Why do you need to make that comment after all I said was it has a big fan base?

Because the implication is that people as saying it is a good product, not because it’s a good product, but because they are part of a cult

There are a few cults :D

- Notion Nation

- Roam Legion

- Zettelkasten Zealots

- Bear Bros

PS. Add more ;)

Also the:

- Evernote Evangelists

- Orgmode Promotion Society

- Plaintext Patriots

- Joplin Javelins

- Obsidian Organisation

etc etc etc

> Plaintext Promotion Society

I think this was the best of them all :D

> - Orgmode Promotion Society

Special OPS reporting for duty :-)

Orgmod Orthodoxer! :)

Orgmode reveling group, for some recursion...

Tesla Taliban

- Markdown Militants

- OneNote Outlanders

- MSBuild Masochists

It's even worse than I thought

Obsidian Ocelots?

Since Obsidian is a glass stone, it can be something related to mining?

Obsidian Dwarf Gang Member

There are two cults:

* those who appreciate effortless UX that doesn't ask users to dedicate their lives to learning arcane systems i.e. CLI UIs but allow focusing on life outside computers. Notion is indeed a step forward for the industry for them.

* those who appreciate the responsiveness of CLI and don't mind the learning curve since the investment for them is worth the price. For them, Notion probably doesn't give sufficient control over their workflows and data.

These are justifiable value choices. Calling each other cults only erodes the discussion into name calling. So please don't.

You're just rambling... I can't even tell what you are trying to say. Slow down

What gives you that Notion?