Notion Is Unusable and Unsafe

I am a sucker for new note-taking and productivity applications, so a couple of years ago, I started using Notion. I still keep logging into it for a very specific purpose, but in general, Notion is largely unusable.

This anonymous post outlining Notion’s usability experience “disaster” does a good job of cataloging all of the ways that Notion is largely unusable. If you read any Notion community groups for any length of time, it quickly becomes clear that Notion is the tool of choice for the sorts of folks who enjoy tinkering around with their productivity systems rather than actually getting things done.

As if the user interface isn’t horrific enough, it has become apparent over the past couple of years that the developer’s behind Notion either a) don’t care or b) don’t know how to make their application secure.

As this Reddit post points out, simply inviting a guest to edit a page grants that guest a large amount of private information that they do not and should not have access to. Stuff like this crops up all the time. It is clear there are almost no privacy or security protections built into Notion.

I still use Notion, but largely because I’ve built an extensive inventory of my action figure collection within Notion. That’s the only sort of data I would trust to Notion as it is today.