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What’s wrong with Confluence? We have a recently-acquired team at work that uses it for everything, and loves it. I’ve used it a bit, and I think it looks awesome, and the pricing is super reasonable.

Confluence looks better than everything else I’ve tried/used as a doc platform: Notion, Nuclino, Coda, Sharepoint, OneNote, Azure DevOps wiki, Microsoft Teams wiki...



My experience with confluence is that it just becomes a landfill of articles that are never read or cared about after 1-2 days they're created.


Confluence is where documentation goes to die. And then rot.


Any suggestions for platforms that help fight against that tendency?


Robust search.

Sorry - not the platform, but capability.


Where to begin? A better question is what's not wrong with Confluence?

When I log in, it shows me a shit ton of articles that I have no interest in. It's like a Facebook feed, or something, where every document everyone in my (1,000+ people) org has written in the last 24 hours is sorted reverse-chronologically. Since I only need to interface with about 10 people normally, this is worse than useless. It actually make finding stuff harder.

But never mind that, how do I find just what I've written? Somewhere there's a list of "recently worked on" things, and that's sometimes useful, but I usually need to edit something I haven't touched in months. I end up having to search all of our Confluence instead of just being able to search only my own articles. It often brings up completely unrelated things and I have to do more work to figure out which are relevant.

When editing, their editor steals OS keys that are used for every app, like Cmd-F for find. Instead of bringing up Safari's find panel, which is 100% always what I want, it brings up their own home-grown find that doesn't actually search the entire page. It only searches the text I'm editing and often does a poor job of it. Other command-keys are also highjacked meaning I can't do normal things like create a new window when editing text. It's bonkers bad.

The calendar section becomes unusable once you have more than about 3 people adding stuff to it. The list goes on and on. I'm actually shocked that anyone here is defending it.


Any suggests for better platforms?


It doesn't help that the Markdown flavour is not standard, and is different again from most other Atlassian products.


And you can only use it to compose and not edit.


Try finding stuff. In a large org, even with as much careful organisation and attempting to make things searchable, it just gets impossible. That doesn't mean Confluence is bad of course - it may just be a hard problem.


the one confluence thing that gets me is that when editing, it intercepts the command + 1 keypresses when im trying to switch tabs.

instead, it just makes my current line h1.




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