That is the modern business model. First you build something so good it becomes indespensible then you squeeze money out of it until your customers hate you just enough to not stop using you.

I don’t know if I’d call it a business model, but it’s certainly something that many modern businesses do.

Trello did the same thing. They killed their single-user friendly features and moved to enterprise first, gouging serious solo users in the process.

I'm still subscribed to both, but I'm not as happy as before.

They could reasonably retire off just the return on investments.

However, if they start using the $5mil to buy houses and cars and whatnot, they are "cashing out the capital". As they spend more and more, the return on investment drops but everything looks great from the outside: they have lots of cash, a lot of "things", and so-on. However, look ahead a few years and they might be left with $500k invested giving them a return of $25,000/year and it's possible that they would no longer be able to retire off that putting them in to a possible tail spin of needing to spend the remaining capital just to pay the monthly bills.

I propose that this is what companies are doing with their "social capital" (which includes the public's impression of the brand and that brand's work on building up their customers). Creating a brand with integrity and values while working to solve a problem well builds social capital. All they have to do is "maintain the balance" (stay true to the values and mission that got them there) in order to keep getting the "return on investment" (continual influx of new paying customers). However, if they choose to start sacrificing values and quality for the short-term gains they can definitely do that. On a quarterly balance sheet it even looks like they are "rich": "We're spending less on dev time by ignoring bug reports and less on servicing free customers while also converting 10% of those old free customers to paying customers. The bottom line is way up!". But because they've sacrificed the values that attracted those customers in the first place new potential customers will start looking more critically, or will choose a competitor, or will even start their own competing service. It's only a matter of time before the company looks at the balance sheet and wonders why income is down. If they are really looking to ruin the company they might even point fingers like "we used to get $250k/yr, but now we're getting $25k and our competitor is getting $225. we must conclude that the market is saturated and we have to go on the offensive against that competitor.", when what they could do is simply accept that they have to start over to rebuild the social capital so they can have the same level of return again (or maybe even take the lesson and work harder to build more capital and have a bigger return in the future).

Yes, the "first" Evernote had great features, but it was all over the place. No clients had the same set of features, and web side was even worse.

When they ditched everything and rebuilt all clients from the same base, they've lost some of the cool features, but I find it much easier to use and rely on.

Only after that point I bought a subscription, fully went into it, and currently building my knowledge base inside it, and collaborating on some stuff.

Simpler is not always worse. Yes, the old Evernote was a "road warrior's utopia", but the current incarnation works much better on a cross-platform perspective, and I'm a happy camper.

https://www.dendron.so/

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dendron

After using Notion, Obsidian, Mem and other tools, I have settled down on this app. Solid community too.

(I assume you mean EULA: https://obsidian.md/eula)

This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada applicable in that Province. Any action or proceeding arising from or relating to this Agreement may only be brought in the courts located in Kitchener, Ontario and each party irrevocably submits to such exclusive jurisdiction and venue.

Obsidian's license terms are weirder than expected. But I'd never hesitate to use a Personal license for random, incidental professional purposes.

But I'm much happier to avoid thinking about the question altogether.

Not an issue for me, but others might be concerned about its (lack of??) mobile support. I do all my work on desktops and sync thru git, so its not been a problem for me.

I just remember seeing comments about it being a bit behind some of the mobile support offered by other systems. I do everything on desktop, so I ignored it. This was a while ago though, sounds like they have a (new?) mobile app?

There are slightly more involved approaches as well:

https://tfthacker.medium.com/dashboard-a-simple-organization...

I use the calendar, and tasks stuff to give me a daily/weekly view in the sidebar for quick nav. and a 'general' note for links to notes I want quick access to.

overall I feel a lot more work is needed in establishing some sort of commons framework.

I very much agree, and there are some compelling projects happening in that space as well:

- https://commonsstack.org/

- https://commonsengine.org/

Getting VC firms on-board is a tough sell, though. Their model intrinsically involves getting a greater return than the up-front investment, usually through centralization, quasi-monopoly, and rent-seeking. The low hit-rate of breakthrough successes makes the perverse incentive all the stronger: VCs need unicorn cash-cows, to offset and subsidize the failures. At best, exit-to-community would be a mechanism to cut losses on investments with a small-but-loyal userbase, but without enough revenue to be truly profitable from the VC's perspective.

the big idea is that after a few such iterations startups will focus on solving the core fundamental issues of the target market rather than build out a bunch of infra. IMO this would reduce capital cost for newer startups in the same field, that should impact the incentives but its subtle.

also, who know if all the work is out in open maybe some new startup would get an idea to put things together in a entirely new way. just imagine if BeOS we opensourced when it went under instead of letting it rot in some server.

Now I use MediaWiki through docker (with Sqlite database) on my home server. It's lightening fast for my personal use, and comes with tons of powerful features (categories, subpages, templates, math syntax, etc.). Because MediaWiki is the same system running Wikipedia, I believe it is very likely will run 10, 20, or even more years. It is not the most convenient to use, but I don't use it for quick notes, for which I just use the default note app on my phone.

Although in the end I ended up with Microsoft OneNote (with Obsidian for special cases), Microsoft isn't going away and they don't have a habit of killing core products like Google does.

Not all your notes can be just Markdown format. You will have image files. And then different apps handle image file location differently. Joplin turns attachment filenames to random strings.

Also, Markdown format is insufficient. I will need categories and subcategories, etc. And then different apps handle those differently.

My bigger gripes are that it doesn't support (markdown) formatting without a subscription, and I can't figure out how to put notes into folders.

Their selling feature (to me) is the privacy focus, because end to end encryption is the default, and a very rare one among other note apps I've taken a look at.

Sync works well, and is one way I use the app, even when I have other things like org-mode in play on some devices. It is typically quite handy to just paste something on my Linux desktop, and copy-paste on my iPhone to send somewhere iOS-specific.

I only use the free version of Standard Notes, but I am a big fan of the product. Their syncing has been the most solid/problem-free I've seen amongst all of the notes apps I've tried over the years.

https://getupnote.com/

Cross-platform, and it feels like what Evernote was back in the day: a simple note-taking app with a beautiful UI.

I replaced Evernote with it a few months ago, and it's been a daily driver since. It was first recommended to me on /r/evernote, a subreddit that has basically been echoing the OP's concerns about Evernote for the last two years it looks like.

If I ever built a note taking app, I'll be using your tag line as a subtitle and a guiding principle :)

"...just a list of notes with some formatting and sync capabilities"

For a sales pitch, the slack team apparently used workflowy to coordinate dev before they launched.

https://workflowy.com

What once warranted an app is simply a feature somewhere in another app. MacOS comes with "Notes", which is perfectly sufficient for me.

I stopped using tools with any kind of lock-in or custom format because I know they will eventually degrade into something unusable.

If I middle-click on a link to open it in a new tab, I paste-insert my clipboard content _into the link text_ instead (I'm on Linux). That's just horrible.

It's actually the browser's default behavior to do what you're describing! Inside a `contenteditable` element, links no longer behave as links -- they aren't clickable, and hovering over the link doesn't show a preview of the HREF attribute in the browsers I've tested. So in order for links to do link things, we have to fight the browser and re-implement these behaviors.

Here's a codesandbox with no JS to demonstate this: https://codesandbox.io/embed/optimistic-resonance-jbyeef?fon...

I created a task to track this bug internally. I think we can probably solve by calling preventDefault for the middle-click event if it bubbles up from inside a link.

I still don't understand the UX. Am I assuming correctly that it's core to the concept of Notion to always be editable and not have an edit/view flip switch? Because I never used Notion to write anything, I just read things other people wrote. And so it's arguably weird to interact with a webpage that as it turns out is secretly an editor only masquerading as a webpage. Sly!

Btw, if links inside a contenteditable aren't supposed to behave as links, why make it clickable in the first place? Because if you make it act like a link, you indeed have to reimplement the whole thing because of expectations.

I'm no interaction designer, but imho a simple edit button would be mucher simpler. It could still be integrated nicely, no need to have wiki-like editing where the entire context is lost.

https://blog.standardnotes.com/33536/how-not-to-build-a-secu...

Currently it is sadly the best set of features within one tool for me (at least the subset I use). I would love to switch to an open source variant to self host. But till then I will probably stay with it.

Still. I don't like the slowness (web and app). I don't like how it feels just off sometimes. And how the Android app just so-so works for me.

My only quibble is the lack of offline functionality.