Evernote Lays Off Most of Staff, Triggering Fears of Closure

Don't understand how they made it this long.

Venture capital spurred by effectively negative interest rates.
- Free money.

I forgot Evernote was still a thing. Used it for a short while back in 2012 when there were not many decent note taking apps.

Ever since I discovered LogSeq and Obsidian, I stopped checking out other note-taking software
- God I love Obsidian. Especially the community around it.
  
  Obsidian honestly spoiled me with the fact that my vault is literally just a folder of markdown files.
- I’ve been using Logseq at work and I LOOOOVE it.
- I can search and read about LogSeq, but I can't find anything about Obsidian. Can you please help me out? Thanks.
- I love Obsidian but haven't heard of LogSeq, do you use both but for different things?
After leaving Evernote way back when I was in the wilderness for a while. Finally landed on notesnook, haven't gone back since.
- Fellow Notesnook user, here. I'm enjoying it. It's what Evernote should have been.
Same. Glad I never actually relied on it...

I switched to Joplin a few years ago from Evernote and haven't looked back. Take control of your own notes - Joplin is open source and has clients for every platform, and imports notebooks from Evernote.

Or Obsidian? Take actual control over them including rendering if you want to customize that.

Maybe it's a different use case 🤔
- Obsidian is closed source, so once the company dies, no one can modify the app. Joplin on the other hand is open source.
- Haven't tried Obsidian, but have heard good things about it. I have about 12,000 notes and continue to be impressed with Joplin's ability to handle that with no issues.
- Different use cases, indeed. All I need is plaintext, images, and in-line pdf rendering. No audio, no video, no LaTeX, not even italics or bold.
  
  Now, to be completely fair, while Joplin is great for simple notes, it’s data entry modes are weird AF. I assume, in a programmers mind, the operation is normal for an IDE as it can’t/won’t render links/objects in line with editing. You either get a markup-only window that’s editable, a rendered window that is read only, or lose half your screen to a split-view version. These options are selected via two, separate, unlabeled, non-status-indicating toggle buttons which cycle through 2 and 3 versions if the view.
  
  Aside from that, it seems nice.
It also has a web clipper, which imo is a very handy feature.

Years ago I was a paid Evernote user. The app kept displaying ads on startup trying to get me to pay even more for the “higher tier”. Right then and there I knew the company was dead.

Not only that, but they kept adding features and telling me about it. I was paying for their existing features, and yet half the time I would go to add a note and by the time I clicked through their "we did something you probably don't care about" popups, I'd forget what I wanted to note.

There is a recent thread discussing Evernote alternatives at https://beehaw.org/post/986939

Personally I exported my notes from Evernote, imported them to Joplin, and setup Syncthing to handle synchronization of note content between my devices. Not exactly a trivial setup but not difficult either. Also fully open source and much more secure.

I mean… haven’t they been surviving purely on inertia for a while already?

They had my inertia. I moved from free to $25/yr. Then watched as it crept up to $60/yr with basically zero improvements. I bailed at $120/yr for a terrible transition to a new db style that could only be updated in real time as you opened each note (taking 3-45 seconds per note to update) and a promised AI component for which I have no use.
- Inertia was carrying me as well. First it was $35 for premium, then $70 for several years, and then last month they announced it was going up to $130 and that's when I bailed.
  
  At $70 it wasn't too bad and I stayed the last year or so also because they actually published a native Linux app that worked on par with the Windows and macOS app. I won't say it worked great because since they moved it all to Electron or whatever it's been slow/clunky all around. But at least it was available and consistent.

And that is why I self-host as much as I can

What's a good self hosted thinking like Evernote?
- For note taking, you might even get by without self-hosting, looking at software like Obsidian which works perfectly fine with just SyncThing to sync between devices, or just literally any other file syncing solution, self-hosted or otherwise.
- It's not quite as full featured as Evernote, but I like Joplin. It can sync using Nextcloud, OneDrive, WebDAV, and other services. It's end to end encrypted and works well on Android!
- What platform? Windows? Unix? Linux?
Know anything that I can move all my pdf's to that has preview and search like evernote?

I gave my resume to Bending Spoons and they didn’t hire me, so fuck them And fuck them for the layoffs, they have people working from home so relocating seems like an excuse

This aged well https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/evernotes-quest-to-become-a-100-year-old-startup

They made it 1/10th of a century. So far, so good, right?
- I’m pretty sure Evernote has been around since early 2000s so it’s at least 2/10ths, lol.

Surprised they still had all that programmers for something that's still stuck in the year 2014

Once Apple overhauled Notes a few years ago AND offered a way to import from Evernote, I never looked back. For anyone in Apple’s ecosystem Notes is one of the best (and completely free or cheap on any iCloud+ plan).

One thing that Evernote got right is that it made it easy to export your content. I really appreciate that about the service. Leaving Apple Notes is not as easy.
How do you import from Evernote?
- From what I remember, you do a full Evernote export and then in Notes on the Mac you do "File --> Import" and you point it to the exported file. I only did it once and many years ago so the process may be different now.

I didn't even know Evernote was still a think. I thought it had died years ago

Holy shit someone tell danny brown to save his raps

I hadn't heard about Evernote in years. Honestly thought they'd gone under years ago.

Everyone here are so cool with fancy open source alterantives. I've been basic and been using Notion for all my med school notes and beyond and while it's been mostly great the few episodes of outages have been so frustrating. Wish there were some easy to use solutions with all the text formatting options Notion has.

Obsidian
- As much as I love obsidian, I've been moving on to Emacs org-mode! I like that Obsidian notes are just text files but with org-mode I get that and it's Emacs which is open-source, thirty years old and literally never going to die. I can export org-mode files to PDFs or even turn them into HTML pages.
- I made the mistake of having bunch of columns, annotated images with captions, and tables everywhere that obsidian's addons couldn't really replicate the experience. For prep work around writing research papers, it's probably easier to use than notion for sure.

Man, I saw something about the other day and it doesn’t make me feel good about still having some work notes in Evernote. I’m going to have to find an alternative, but I need collaboration and low cost (cuz my company is cheap AF). And I know those two things don’t usually go together.

significant boost in operational efficiency that will come as a consequence of centralizing operations in Europe.

On one hand, this is understandable. My employer recently went through similar learnings and dealt with this equally.

But if the whole know-how of the code and platform needs to be shifted over, this is an awful lot of risk and problems. Maybe they already did the transition. Who knows.

I don't think they intend to shutdown the service, but I wouldn't be surprised if the service gets more and more unstable, progresses slower than before and thereby slowly dies off with the competitors speeding ahead.

Another example of why federated services are good idea. Also, all such services must be willing to hand over all your data. Which implies open standards and open sourced implementations.

You can already export your data from Evernote.

I finally bailed on it this year.

I have this suspicion that it might survive even this though, it's been through so much over the years

How are they going to funnel all that user data to the CCP if they close down. Having access to secure notes and passwords directly from people sounds like a goldmine

Wait how are they related
- Back in 2014-2018 or so they set up local infrastructure centers, in China they used Tencent Cloud.
  
  Switching this to local data centers means the government can just up and ask for that date when they want it and Chinese companies are obligated to obey, compared to when it was kept overseas.

Anyone know a good alternative for storing PDFs with preview and search?

Paperless might be what you want
- Yes I've tried paperless before and found it rather lacking unfortunatley. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Meh, Obsidian is bae now

If you prefer markdown and don't need a massive set of features, I highly recommend notable.

Wait, didn't they close like years ago? I definitely remember reading something about it way before covid. Is it some kind of Mandela effect or was there something?

They got rid of their free offerings, maybe that's what you are thinking of.
- They still have a free tier but it's locked way down (2 devices only, and accessing the web site counts as a different "device" from each system).