Just kinda asking this anywhere I can think to ask it in case someone has suggestions â Evernote recently decided to double the price of my subscription (on top of pushing AI and repeatedly changing their interface to be worse for some reason), and that's pretty much the last straw for me. I use it for a variety of writing- and life-related note-taking and list-making, as well as for keeping story/worldbuilding info in a centralized location, and it's also where I tend to write short stories or snippets because that makes my brain happier than writing in emails or creating far too many small docs in Google Docs. Anyone have suggestions?
The main features I'm looking for:
Works on my phone (Android), my computer (Windows), and as a web app (for when I'm at work).
Can edit notes online or offline (so I can work on stuff when I'm traveling or when my phone decides that my workplace is actually a nuclear fallout shelter with no internet connections).
Has a decent folder/notebook and tagging system for keeping notes organized.
Can handle images and formatting, not just plain text.
Free is nice, but I don't mind putting in some money for a better product, either a one-and-done fee (preferred) or a subscription (as long as it's less than or equal to what I'm currently paying).
No or minimal AI interference.
Options I've already considered
Microsoft OneNote â not included in the Office package I have, would be just as pricey as Evernote, and last time I checked I don't like the interface.
Google Drive/Docs â I already use this for long-form writing, but my brain rebels at using it as what is basically a higher-quality notepad.
Drafting in emails and sending them to myself â I did this for a while and specifically got Evernote so I could stop doing it and have things centralized. I am not going back.
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Evernote, a web-based notes app, recently introduced super-restrictive controls on free accounts, after laying off a number of staff and introducing AI features, all of which is causing a lot of people to migrate off the platform. I haven't extensively researched alternative sites, so I can't offer a full resource there (readers, feel free to drop your alternative sites in notes or reblogs), but because I have access to OneNote both in my professional and personal life, I decided to migrate my Evernote there.
I use them for very different things -- Evernote I use exclusively as a personal fanfic archive, because it stores fics I want to save privately both as full-text files and as links. OneNote I have traditionally used for professional purposes, mainly for taking meeting notes and storing information I need (excel formulas, how-tos for things I don't do often in our database, etc). But while Evernote had some nicer features it was essentially a OneNote clone, and OneNote has a webclipper, so I've created an account with OneNote specifically to store my old Evernote archive and any incoming fanfic I want to archive in future.
Microsoft discontinued the tool that it offered for migrating Evernote to OneNote directly, but research turned up a reliable and so-far trustworthy independent tool that I wanted to share. You export all your Evernote notebooks as ENEX files, then download the tool and unzip it, open the exe file, and import the ENEX one by one on a computer where you already have the desktop version of OneNote installed. I had no problem with the process, although some folks with older systems might.
I suspect I might need to do some cleanup post-import but some of that is down to how Evernote fucked around with tags a while ago, and so far looking through my notes it appears to have imported formatting, links, art, and other various aspects of each clipped note without a problem. I also suspect that Evernote will not eternally allow free users to export their notebooks so if nothing else I'd back up your notebooks to ENEX or HTML files sooner rather than later.
I know the number of people who were using Free Evernote and have access to OneNote is probably pretty small, but if I found it useful I thought others might too.
Enshittification isnât inevitable: under different conditions and constraints, the old, good internet could have given way to a new, good internet. Enshittification is the result of specific policy choices: encouraging monopolies; enabling high-speed, digital shell games; and blocking interoperability.
First we allowed companies to buy up their competitors. Google is the shining example here: having made one good product (search), they then fielded an essentially unbroken string of in-house flops, but it didnât matter, because they were able to buy their way to glory: video, mobile, ad-tech, server management, docs, navigationâŚTheyâre not Willy Wonkaâs idea factory, theyâre Rich Uncle Pennybags, making up for their lack of invention by buying out everyone else:
But this acquisition-fueled growth isnât unique to tech. Every administration since Reagan (but not Biden! more on this later) has chipped away at antitrust enforcement, so that every sector has undergone an orgy of mergers, from athletic shoes to sea freight, eyeglasses to pro wrestling:
But tech is different, because digital is flexible in a way that analog can never be. Tech companies can âtwiddleâ the back-ends of their clouds to change the rules of the business from moment to moment, in a high-speed shell-game that can make it impossible to know what kind of deal youâre getting:
To make things worse, users are banned from twiddling. The thicket of rules we call IP ensure that twiddling is only done against users, never for them. Reverse-engineering, scraping, bots â these can all be blocked with legal threats and suits and even criminal sanctions, even if theyâre being done for legitimate purposes:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Enhittification isnât inevitable but if we let companies buy all their competitors, if we let them twiddle us with every hour that God sends, if we make it illegal to twiddle back in self-defense, we will get twiddled to death. When a company can operate without the discipline of competition, nor of privacy law, nor of labor law, nor of fair trading law, with the US government standing by to punish any rival who alters the logic of their service, then enshittification is the utterly foreseeable outcome.
To understand how our technology gets distorted by these policy choices, consider âThe Cloud.â Once, âthe cloudâ was just a white-board glyph, a way to show that some part of a softwareâs logic would touch some commodified, fungible, interchangeable appendage of the internet. Today, âThe Cloudâ is a flashing warning sign, the harbinger of enshittification.
When your image-editing tools live on your computer, your files are yours. But once Adobe moves your software to The Cloud, your critical, labor-intensive, unrecreatable images are purely contingent. At at time, without notice, Adobe can twiddle the back end and literally steal the colors out of your own files:
The finance sector loves The Cloud. Add âThe Cloudâ to a product and profits (money you get for selling something) can turn into rents (money you get for owning something). Profits can be eroded by competition, but rents are evergreen:
No wonder The Cloud has seeped into every corner of our lives. Remember your first iPod? Adding music to it was trivial: double click any music file to import it into iTunes, then plug in your iPod and presto, synched! Today, even sophisticated technology users struggle to âside loadâ files onto their mobile devices. Instead, the mobile duopoly â Apple and Google, who bought their way to mobile glory and have converged on the same rent-seeking business practices, down to the percentages they charge â want you to get your files from The Cloud, via their apps. This isnât for technological reasons, itâs a business imperative: 30% of every transaction that involves an app gets creamed off by either Apple or Google in pure rents:
And yet, The Cloud is undeniably useful. Having your files synch across multiple devices, including your collaboratorsâ devices, with built-in tools for resolving conflicting changes, is amazing. Indeed, this feat is the holy grail of networked tools, because itâs how programmers write all the software we use, including software in The Cloud.
If you want to know how good a tool can be, just look at the tools that toolsmiths use. With âsource controlâ â the software programmers use to collaboratively write software â we get a very different vision of how The Cloud could operate. Indeed, modern source control doesnât use The Cloud at all. Programmersâ workflow doesnât break if they canât access the internet, and if the company that provides their source control servers goes away, itâs simplicity itself to move onto another server provider.
This isnât The Cloud, itâs just âthe cloudâ â that whiteboard glyph from the days of the old, good internet â freely interchangeable, eminently fungible, disposable and replaceable. For a tool like git, Github is just one possible synchronization point among many, all of which have a workflow whereby programmersâ computers automatically make local copies of all relevant data and periodically lob it back up to one or more servers, resolving conflicting edits through a process that is also largely automated.
Thereâs a name for this model: itâs called âLocal Firstâ computing, which is computing that starts from the presumption that the user and their device is the most important element of the system. Networked servers are dumb pipes and dumb storage, a nice-to-have that fails gracefully when itâs not available.
The data structures of source-code are among the most complicated formats we have; if we can do this for code, we can do it for spreadsheets, word-processing files, slide-decks, even edit-decision-lists for video and audio projects. If local-first computing can work for programmers writing code, it can work for the programs those programmers write.
Local-first computing is experiencing a renaissance. Writing for Wired, Gregory Barber traces the history of the movement, starting with the French computer scientist Marc Shapiro, who helped develop the theory of âConflict-Free Replicated Dataâ â a way to synchronize data after multiple people edit it â two decades ago:
Shapiro and his co-author Nuno Preguiça envisioned CFRD as the building block of a new generation of P2P collaboration tools that werenât exactly serverless, but which also didnât rely on servers as the lynchpin of their operation. They published a technical paper that, while exiting, was largely drowned out by the release of GoogleDocs (based on technology built by a company that Google bought, not something Google made in-house).
Shapiro and Preguiçaâs work got fresh interest with the 2019 publication of âLocal-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud,â a viral whitepaper-cum-manifesto from a quartet of computer scientists associated with Cambridge University and Ink and Switch, a self-described âindustrial research labâ:
The paper describes how its authors â Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg and Mark McGranaghan â prototyped and tested a bunch of simple local-first collaboration tools built on CFRD algorithms, with the goal of ânetwork optionalâŚseamless collaboration.â The results are impressive, if nascent. Conflicting edits were simpler to resolve than the authors anticipated, and users found URLs to be a good, intuitive way of sharing documents. The biggest hurdles are relatively minor, like managing large amounts of change-data associated with shared files.
Just as importantly, the paper makes the case for why youâd want to switch to local-first computing. The Cloud is not reliable. Companies like Evernote donât last forever â they can disappear in an eyeblink, and take your data with them:
Google isnât likely to disappear any time soon, but Google is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA program (âI have altered the deal, pray I donât alter it any furtherâ) and notorious for shuttering its products, even beloved ones like Google Reader:
And while the authors donât mention it, Google is also prone to simply kicking people off all its services, costing them their phone numbers, email addresses, photos, document archives and more:
There is enormous enthusiasm among developers for local-first application design, which is only natural. After all, companies that use The Cloud go to great lengths to make it just âthe cloud,â using containerization to simplify hopping from one cloud provider to another in a bid to stave off lock-in from their cloud providers and the enshittification that inevitably follows.
The nimbleness of containerization acts as a disciplining force on cloud providers when they deal with their business customers: disciplined by the threat of losing money, cloud companies are incentivized to treat those customers better. The companies we deal with as end-users know exactly how bad it gets when a tech company can impose high switching costs on you and then turn the screws until things are almost-but-not-quite so bad that you bolt for the doors. They devote fantastic effort to making sure that never happens to them â and that they can always do that to you.
Interoperability â the ability to leave one service for another â is technologyâs secret weapon, the thing that ensures that users can turn The Cloud into âthe cloud,â a humble whiteboard glyph that you can erase and redraw whenever it suits you. Itâs the greatest hedge we have against enshittification, so small wonder that Big Tech has spent decades using interop to clobber their competitors, and lobbying to make it illegal to use interop against them:
Getting interop back is a hard slog, but itâs also our best shot at creating a new, good internet that lives up the promise of the old, good internet. In my next book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso Books, Sept 5), I set out a program fro disenshittifying the internet:
The book is up for pre-order on Kickstarter now, along with an independent, DRM-free audiobooks (DRM-free media is the content-layer equivalent of containerized services â you can move them into or out of any app you want):
http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org
Meanwhile, Lina Khan, the FTC and the DoJ Antitrust Division are taking steps to halt the economic side of enshittification, publishing new merger guidelines that will ban the kind of anticompetitive merger that let Big Tech buy its way to glory:
The internet doesnât have to be enshittified, and itâs not too late to disenshittify it. Indeed â the same forces that enshittified the internet â monopoly mergers, a privacy and labor free-for-all, prohibitions on user-side twiddling â have enshittified everything from cars to powered wheelchairs. Not only should we fight enshittification â we must.
Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!
If youâd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, hereâs a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-
free, tracker-free blog:
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Another issue I have with the whole Evernote thing is that they asked me for $10.99 a month or $129 a year, but my mom opened it on her phone to see what was going on, and they asked her for $14.99 a month. They did this in a pop-up that blocked the rest of the app and had no visible way to close it. No x, no ânot right now.â They made it look like you could either pay, or you could close the app. I managed to swipe it away, but there was no indication that you could or should do thatâ
And then a box came up that simply said âCancel [or] Confirm.â
Cancel [or] confirm WHAT? That Iâm paying? That Iâm declining?
It turns out they meant âconfirm that youâre leaving this âofferâ pop-up.â I guessed correctly. (I checked my momâs subscriptions to be sure I hadnât somehow âconfirmedâ payment.)
I then did the same on my phoneâjust got rid of the insistence that I payâand Iâm now able to access and edit all my documents just fine. (Being able to edit on my phone rather than sit up at a computer is a disability/accessibility issue for me.) I donât want to tempt fate by trying to create a new document, but my guess is that they might restrict me from doing that now, since Iâm over 50 (!) notes. Someone else can test that out, if they want. As is, they donât seem to be freezing the documents I do already have.
My point is, thoughâthatâs so fucking shady. Not only are they shaking us down for a lot of moneyâI might have considered paying half that muchâbut theyâre making it look like you have no choice. That you canât even access your existing documents (even just to copy them elsewhere!) unless you pay, when in fact you absolutely can. And thatâs my OTHER big issue with Evernote making the service pretty much entirely paid: if youâre going to act like this, then I canât trust you.
So I had been using Evernote to write bc I write on my phone just as much as I do the desktop app, and I opened the app last night to this:
I can no longer create notes or a new notebook :) without a paid plan.
Mind you, I have paid for this app on and off for YEARS. I think Iâve had Evernote since it came out way back when. Used it for school and work. I havenât paid for it in a while bc I simply havenât needed that functionality, but this is such a slap in the face. I have notebooks with over 200 and 300 notes in them.
It says I can still edit what I have, but I donât trust that in the slightest. So Iâm in the process of migrating my stuff to try and back it up and my WIPs for those of you who have requests are in the middle of this.
Does anyone have any recommendations? I want to avoid google docs for various reasons, but I feel so weirdly betrayed over this whole thing. Theyâve been pushing the subscriptions in the most annoying way for a while, so I guess I should have seen it coming, but that doesnât make this any less disgusting.
