I've been looking for a collaborative alternative to Evernote (which is terribly) and Google Docs (which is very functional, but in many ways terrible) for some time, and I've also looked at Notion. Slite looks beautiful, and the on-boarding is slick. But it fails in too many ways, just like Notion.

Slite channels don't scale beyond a few notes. Like Evernote, the sidebar becomes a hard-to-navigate, endlessly scrolling list of stuff, and search becomes the only way to find what you want, which is of course terrible for discovery. There's no grouping mechanism where order matters. "Collections" are sorted, but only by title or date, not manually. So there's no way to collate and publish information. Google Docs, of course, has the same problem.

This is one area where Notion is marginally better, since pages have an inherent order, so you can build "books" of content (e.g. technical documentation, project plans, etc.). But you still have to manually create the navigation, since tables of contents aren't made for you. In Slite, publishing anything that has structure is basically impossible — everything is just a sea of notes. Another problem with Slite and Notion is that there are, inherently, types of notes/pages, but there's no way to classify them except possibly by tag. A set of meeting notes != a project plan != a scrapbook of possible office furniture != a todo list. And so on.

The more I think about apps like Evernote and Slite, the more I think the idea of note as an independent unit of information is wrong — unless all you do is write notes that have a short life cycle, like shopping lists. To build an organization around information, the information model has to be powerful. For example, a common use case shown in screenshots for Slite and other products is the idea of a checklist. We're doing a project, we have to have some designs, do some marketing, do some development. We create an outline:

[ ] Hire intern to work on leaflets

What's a thing that happens? Someone wants to comment on a specific task. So you have some person writing it into the document:

[ ] Hire intern to work on leaflets *(who's gonna
do this? Brad??!)*

then:

[ ] Hire intern to work on leaflets *(who's gonna
do this? Brad??!)* I'm on it — Liz :)

And off it goes. There's an inherent underlying data model here (checklists) expressed as a freely editable WYSIWYG bullet list. Documents like these quickly turn into messy junk, like a whiteboard full of scribbles, because people are all over it. Google Docs has an annotation feature for this, but it doesn't scale at all.

I've looked through the product tour and tons of screenshots looking for what people are actually using Slite for, and I mostly see disorder. Meeting notes, sure. Project planning, todo list, bugs, scrapbooking, wiki-type tech docs... none of it seems appropriate for Slite, which leaves me wondering what I could use it for. I don't need another poor Evernote, I don't think anyone does, even if it's nicer-looking.

At one point I wondered if Slite could be useful for scrapbooking (example use case: collecting tons of inspirational material for guide one's interior design directions for the company office; another is collecting a bunch of products for comparison before whittling down candidates for purchase), but it's unfortunately not. You can't even drag and drop files into the web page, and once you've uploaded a file or image to the page, it cannot be moved around or copied/pasted (!).

Notion at least gets one kind of useful data model right, which is that of a wiki. Interlinking is, strangely enough, a buried feature (to you have to click on "Copy Link" of a page, then paste that, to get an inline link), but it's there.