Notion Templates Are Getting Worse. Here's Why.
The template market rewards screenshots over substance, and buyers are paying for it.
Spend twenty minutes browsing Notion template marketplaces and you'll notice a pattern. Everything looks the same. Pastel covers, icon sets, a hero image of a dashboard with eight linked views. The screenshots are gorgeous. The templates, increasingly, are not.
The incentive structure is the problem. Templates sell on visual appeal, and visual appeal is judged from a screenshot, not from two weeks of daily use. So creators optimize for the screenshot. More widgets, more colors, more views that look impressive but fragment your attention every time you open the page.
I'm not exempt from this. Early versions of my own templates had decorative elements I never used. I cut them after watching a customer's screen share where she scrolled past the entire top half of a page to reach the part she actually needed.
What I want to see more of: templates that ship with a setup guide explaining the thinking, not just the clicking. Templates that document what they deliberately left out. And buyers who ask 'what does this replace?' before adding anything to their workspace. If a template can't answer that, it's decoration.