That's because it's an app, not a site [0]

As @jklinger410 mentioned, it's a combination of notes, to do, personal wiki and other stuff.

[0]: https://www.notion.so

im not sure UX criticism is irrelevant if the subject is an “app” or a “site”.

It does when the criticism is "web application with its own keybindings doesn't behave like a document."

Like if this was a Google Docs link I don't think you would flinch at the idea that arrow down moves the cursor instead of scrolling the page.

What is the point of an arrow key highlighting individual blocks if the individual blocks aren't editable and don't have any actions associated with them?

I don't know much about Notion, but if it's trying to be a platform that allows you to share notes and documents, its keybinding ought to be rethought. These are really bad shortcuts for a document presentation platform.

And if it's not a document presentation platform, the author shouldn't have used it that way.

If someone linked me a document that was a read-only Excel file where every paragraph was a different cell, I'd complain about that too -- because the content doesn't fit the medium it's posted in.

From a content perspective, this is a document masquerading as an app. What about this page is an app? I can't edit it, there aren't any dynamic calculations happening, the data isn't clearly separated into a table format. When I click to expand a section, I get a loading icon... and then pure text pops up that could have just been embedded into the page from the start. There's nothing that distinguishes this from a normal webpage except that the shortcuts are unintuitive.

Go visit that "app" and use the arrow keys and mouse clicks, and form a coherent theory of how the arrow keys do something sensible. arrow down moves a highlight cursor down the page, until you click, at which point highlighting disappears, and arrow starts scrolling the page, or does nothing, depending on...something?

and trello and airtable