(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)

- 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.

Why do people tolerate the WWW working like this?

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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've ever had. 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.

Roam also took absurdly long to finish loading, long enough to lose my train of thought and get angry at Roam instead of writing down what I wanted to write down. I would write it in Sublime Text while Roam loaded, then paste it in. Then wonder why I was bothering with Roam when I could’ve already saved a text file with my note, to a directory somewhere.

Do you think Roam’s team fixed the performance problems? Ha.

This is so true. Regardless of how useful note taking actually is, the kind of people using these apps are those who like the idea of having everything "perfectly organized" - and this friction and uncertainty of where to put notes gets in the way of that. I'm the same. Every time I know that I don't have a proper place for a note I stop taking notes alltogether. I guess that's for the better.

Perhaps what he needs is for the tool to automatically ask him "Is it okay to delete this note from 60 days ago?" That should be long enough for him to lose any attachment to what he wrote and a lot of the time he should say yes, and delete the crap.

[0]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

[1]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-ui