Are there extensions that e.g. use NLP/LLMs/vectors to suggest potential links from elsewhere in ones KB? Could be a fairly straightforward plugin.

(I haven't used Roam personally and have no idea if it even has a plugin architecture or is extensible, but this reminds me a lot of some of the knowledge management work we're doing with corporates)

Roam has always felt like a bit of a chore -- while it's easy enough to set up backlinks, having to do that one step has always been like a waste of time to me. This is the kind of thing that imo an agentic workflow could do for you:

- Just start typing

- Let the LLM analyze what you're typing, given the RAG database of everything else you've added, and be able to make those kinds of correlations quickly.

- One-button approve the backlinks that it's suggesting (or even go Cursor-style yolo mode for your backlinks).

Then, have a periodic process do some kind of directed analysis; are you keeping a journal, and want to make sure that you're writing enough in your journal? Are you talking about the same subjects over and over again? Should you mix things up? Things like that would be perfect for an LLM to make suggestions about. I don't know if Roam is thinking of doing this or not.

When I tried to read this, I was sent through several redirects with a total of somewhere around 80MB or more of data downloaded, to end up at an otherwise blank "Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue" screen.

Why do people tolerate the WWW working like this?

I used to use Roam, but they move like molasses, no new features or fixes for weeks. F’ing on cruise 40 in a 60 zone. Also it didn’t give me much “connecting the dots”. I went back to simple Apple notes, save myself some time trying to squeeze value from the subscription

It seems like it would work really well for someone who practices zettelkasten. I spent some time trying to learn to manage my knowledge using it with Roam but it never quite clicked with my way of working.

Another one for the “not really using Roam any more” box

A post on Obsidian and a post on Roam today?

I don't know about you guys, but I'm an Obsidian lover and that's not gonna stop anytime soon. IMO the big problem about what this guy is saying can be boiled down to this:

>My most common behavior is to Actually Write the Notes. That’s why Roam needs to help me with the thought, ‘I don’t know where to put this.’ If it does that well, it makes the vast majority of my time spent in the app a breeze. If it does that poorly, it makes my experience so painful that I want to switch systems.

The lesson of Obsidian for me has been that organization is creativity. If what you want is to have an ideological maid that can organize all your thoughts for you, then you're gonna have a bad time with any note taking service (although I'm sure you can develop llm plugins to do this in a way that you personally enjoy now.) What's beneficial about these note apps is that they put this issue directly in front of your face. Either rise to meet it or go back to pretending like organization doesn't matter and avoid the responsibility of creativity.

Using Obsidian goes through stages much like a growing business. You start and you have personal relationships with all the notes so you can remember them, but once you get enough notes you realize it's too much to manage just using personal relationships and you need to start implementing a system. As you get better, your system changes, leaving a paper trail of notes with different systems. That's why the only thing that I think these note apps need is a deprecation system, but otherwise IMO they're perfect.

Tana, Capacities, Bear, Lgseq all have backlinks and other stuff from Roam for years now or so, thanks to Roam IMO. I wish they were able to make some good money from this innovation but they moved too slow at some crucial moment.

OTOH the app that really won was Obsidian, due to flawless execution with the "local first" principle. Being closed source and "not listening too much to the community" weren't issues, they just focused and improved consistently.

> But there’s one main reason that I don’t use it anymore: when I write my notes the thought, ‘Where am I going to put this?’ plagues me every time. It’s a direct and immediate pain. And it sometimes gets in the way of me even taking notes at all. I have this sensation many times a day and it’s deeply uncomfortable.

I had a similar problem when designing my personal management system last decade [1]. Every system you use, you have to stick to in order to get results. Sticking to a system can be emotionally draining to the point where you give up.

IMHO, that sense of emotional drain you get with fancy note-taking systems is tapping into something true. Only a small fraction of what we think we need to remember actually matters and will benefit from so much care to structuring it. The rest is a waste and a drain on our limited cognitive resources.

My solution is to initially write in a designated place that allows for less structure. In the to-do system, the main doc has a "landing zone" for action items to be quickly jotted down, then structured and organized later. In the project system, I'll have a "dump" file where I dump project thoughts that I'm not sure are important. I trust that if the ideas I jot down are actually important, the structure they deserve will come to me later.

Is that trust always right? Maybe not 100% of the time, but it seems like a more useful heuristic than "everything I put into this system needs lots of structure I don't feel like providing, so I don't, and it makes me feel like a failure".

[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/renormalize/p/my-markdown-proj...

Logseq has been my go-to for a couple of years now, it's datalog-esque query language is great for automated page generation, and it's implicit "indirect" links are also really nice- the block-level note primative fits very neatly in my head as well.

[2022], earlier discussion at the time (109 points, 103 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30320977

I started using Roam and as a proper geek, dug through the data it sends back and forth about me and my notes in the browser console. It was doing access logs and some random day I saw some random dude’s name in the access log for my notes. I reached out to ask. They told me he was a new employee. I saw no reason to save personal notes and ideas on a platform where any employee can enjoy them. Thereafter I took my notes to tools i wrote myself. Very enlightening to the incentives for building such tools.

I do not understand how people have enough things to put down for posterity where they need linking between different documents, rather than a simple hierarchy. I suppose we are very different humans.

I think people overcomplicate note-taking.

Make topic-specific folders for discrete topics (e.g. recipes). Anything generic, put it in a big diary file with daily entries. It's easy to scroll through my past few days of notes, and after a few days I don't really need to reference uncategorized miscellanea for the most part. If I do, I can usually find it with ctrl-F-style text search.

At the end of the day/week/whatever, feel free to #tag anything you think you'll need to come back to or copy it into a topic-specific file. I mostly don't do this though. People feel a need to retain this big body of knowledge from their notes, but I think most notes are disposable. It's easier to wait a little while before reviewing & then decide what's worth saving, which is typically not much.

Not surprised to see this. Whats interesting to me in all this is the misplaced faith in emergent structure.

Roam bet on the idea that if you link enough atomic notes, structure will self-organize.

Which is such a weird fantasy if you spend a few minutes thinking about it. Try writing code like that or building a company or just about anything else! Why should notetaking and archive development be any different

It's clear you need some sort of editorial hand to create something maintainable and future proof. Like zettelkasten had Luhmann’s obsessive discipline behind it. Evidently roam had um. enthusiasm and javascript?

and yeah, it’s telling that the comparison is to IDEs. Imagine an IDE that dumped every snippet you typed into a graph database and expected you to recompile coherence out of it by browsing links. thats what roam felt like after the honeymoon.

In general most of Roam's target should want to lean harder into opinionated workflows. there’s a reason tools like linear or notion are winning. they’re structured enough to relieve cognitive load, flexible enough to adapt. Roam tried to be emacs, but turns out most users don’t want to configure their own productivity dialect.

also, lol at the idea of "automated taxonomy". The entire knowledge management industry keeps rediscovering ontologies like they’re new. We are probably going to reinvent OWL at some point and give it a name like "neuroschema" or something

In 2020 so many people recommended this to me in support of my writing and related research. But my laziness saved me.

The founder raised $8M on Wefunder and seems too have taken it and run. He hasn't provided any updates for a few years now.

> It turns out that I am rarely in a position, while writing or thinking, where I want to glance through lots of old notes as a way to figure out what to say or do. Mostly that feels like sifting through stale garbage.

IMHO you may need to produce much better quality knowledge. You are missing out.

A good KB - personal or shared - captures high-value knowledge and lets you pickup where you left off, years later, with little effort. That way you are always working with the best knowledge you have. What defines high-value?

First, it's high-impact - it changes things in significant ways: Trivia about C++'s origins is unlikely to be worthwhile; something from an expert that changes your whole perspective about C++'s design and applications may be. Also it's accurate, high-quality knowledge (otherwise the impact will be much reduced or it may even be significant in the wrong way); for example, Wikipedia IMHO doesn't qualify (in other ways too), but a lit review by an expert can be priceless.

Second, it's hard to replace: 1) Discovery is unlikely: you are unlikely to think of or encounter it next time, at least not unless you revisit the issue in depth. 2) It's hard to find - even if you think of it, you won't be able to find it or recreate it easily. Maybe it's buried in a book you won't remember. For example, if you have info on operating systems, you need little about Windows, Android, etc. because you use them daily (hypothetically) and info is easily available. Insights on TempleOS might be better, or from that keynote by Dennis Ritchie that you attended.

By capturing the value, you get much greater ROI - a lifetime or career of it - from your knowledge work. That also incentivizes deep, high-value knowledge work.