this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 21 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (23 children)

Browse the web sites of Notion, Figma, or Slack

I did out of curiosity, especially since I've never heard about the first two and "Figma" sounds like a bad attempt at a Ligma joke.

Notion

Tagline:

Write, plan, organize, play Turn ideas into action with Notion’s AI-powered workspace.

Plus this gem

"Your AI everything app." ~ Forbes

Wait I thought X was the everything app.

I scrolled through and I have no idea why anyone would pay for this. It doesn't seem to be able to do anything that a GitLab instance can't and "AI" here just looks like a hook to ChatGPT.

Figma

balls! haha

How you design, align, and build matters. Do it together with Figma.

What the hell does "align" mean here? Align like a div to be centered? It seems to be a design tool so that's what I assume, but it's a weird thing to focus on.

Co-create in one space Work together in real time and empower designers to create in new ways.

Okay, this at least gives me a product pitch - design tool with real-time sharing like in Google Docs. That sounds actually useful.

Keep workflows efficient with tools that give every team visibility throughout the process.

... aaand this is just word salad, you lost me.

The rest looks like a regular pitch for a prototype tool for UX, which I think is a pretty specific and useful tool though, so I'm not 100% sure why it'd fit with the theme of the blogpost. Maybe I'm missing something, I never actually dealt with serious UX design.

Slack

This one was I surprised by since I thought I knew what the entire Slack product is - it's a chat. You have channels, direct messages, and pings. That's about it, right?

Move faster with your tools in one place Automate away routine tasks with the power of generative AI and simplify your workflow with all your favourite apps ready to go in Slack.

God what.

The rest is a normal pitch, flexible communications, remote work, channels, etc. But why would you start with AI? Again, Slack is a chat app why would you want gen AI in a chat app?

[–] ebu@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

It doesn’t seem to be able to do anything that a GitLab instance can’t

i didn't believe you, but yeah, just learned GitLab has a wiki editor. so yeah, this covers like 95% of the things i once used Notion for. i guess if i want to be pedantic, Notion had database relations between tables that, as the name implies, allowed it to act a bit like an relational database. (e.g. allowing columns of tables to be limited to the values of rows of other tables). admittedly a little cool but in my experience was not much more useful than a simple table

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

just learned GitLab has a wiki editor.

And it's had it at least since 2017, which is before anyone has even heard of Notion.

Selling shit you can have for free, the closed-source business story.

[–] ebu@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago

this is funny to me because it took Notion until late 2021 to introduce simple, non-database tables (since the database tables were often large, unwieldy, and introduced way too much overhead to just write a simple rows-and-columns spreadsheet, something that's been a thing in GitHub Flavored Markdown since at least 2009

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