Or as the title of the piece says "The Fall of Roam". It's an interesting article from a person who went full in with links, backlinks, etc, and then after a year or so of using Roam for his notetaking suddenly decided that all this connectivity was not what it was cracked up to be. Check out the article, but beware that it finishes abruptly with a subscription required to read the rest of the article, although for $1 a trial can be had.

https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

Heh, I experimented with Roam a little while ago, but never built up any enthusiasm:

a) the UX isn’t great, especially by modern standards
b) the plethora of plugins/extensions etc. is overwhelming!
c) the roadmap/mission isn’t terribly clear (kitchen sink? or forensic research tool?)
d) there are better (i.e. friendlier), albeit more lightweight options out there (e.g. Effie, still very much in its infancy)
e) for various ease-of-management reasons, I’ve had to back out of my various somewhat idiosyncratic task management solutions and have now committed everything to TickTick, which is an exemplary study of how to chuck in the entire kitchen (including sink) while at the same time retaining a laser-like focus on task management. Fine, so the People’s Republic may now have a large file on What Bill Is Up To somewhere. Do I care? Not really. Plus, it’s totally multi-cross-pan-platform; you can use it on everything!

Cheers,
Bill

It's a good warning for those of us who are considering jumping in, what it feels like after a while of using it.

I've never been attracted to Roam, but have just started using Logseq, which has a decent mobile app already, along with the benefit of keeping my own data. So I'm just starting to explore the value of the [[bracketed links]] versus my usual method of folders of notes with tags. The killer feature for me is the linked and unlinked mentions, that helps to connect things easily.

I'm planning to use Logseq selectively to develop some ideas, since Idifferent kinds of information go in hierarchies versus networks. It's also mentioned here (bit of a long read): https://fortelabs.co/blog/a-complete-guide-to-tagging-for-personal-knowledge-management/

Thanks for sharing!

There is a similar topic going on macpoweruser, and this comment is the one I strongly agree with:
https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/the-fall-of-roam/27724/12

ShiJianhui wrote:

There is a similar topic going on macpoweruser, and this comment is the
one I strongly agree with:
https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/the-fall-of-roam/27724/12

I haven't subscribed to be able to read the original article, but if this is the substance of the critque, then I'd agree that the problem is not with Roam (the tool).

I loathe to be the one coming here to defend Roam, especially as they banned me from their Reddit thread for daring to point out its shortcomings and suggesting improvements, so I'm no fan of the company or the CEO, but...

I have to admit that Roam has revolutionised the way I'm managing my todos and my daily life and my weekly, monthly and annual cycles.

It allowed me to move onto a whole another level of organisation.

It's key strength for me has been that I was able to invent and build a system for myself - the same reason why I loved ConnectedText so much.

By all accounts Logseq is very similar, but automatic online sync / cloud availability for me is essential, and so far I haven't seen anything that could replace Roam for me, however much I'd like to ditch it.

Interesting back and forth on Roam.

I could never warm up to Roam myself, but I saw that as just that it didn't fit my style of note-taking (or lack thereof). Roam does have room for improvement, as Bill points out. But if it works for you, those deficiencies are probably not a problem.

To me, the most important influence on note taking from Roam is the idea of the Daily Note. Maybe Roam didn't invent that feature, but it seems to have popularized it. I think it is a very valuable addition.

Steve

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

To me, the most important influence on note taking from Roam is the idea
of the Daily Note. Maybe Roam didn't invent that feature, but it seems
to have popularized it. I think it is a very valuable addition.

Yes, it's a very simple idea, and in a way not that much different from Google Calendar automatically advancing through time and always showing you today's date.

One could manually re-create it every day in WorkFlowy, which I did try in the past, but I just couldn't keep up with it. You forget to do it one day, and inertia sets in, and the whole routine falls apart.

Also, psychologically it's helpful that Roam starts with a blank new date every day. Because starting with reviewing yesterday's incomplete todos may lead you down the wrong path. Having a blank slate allows you to focus on today's priorities and reassess your previous priorities later. You can still return to yesterday's incomplete todos and decide whether they are worth revisiting or need to be moved further into the future.

But another important feature is the date links themselves, given that each date such as [[February 18th, 2022]] is a page and a link, and therefore backlinks are also automatically produced wherever you insert a date link, making it easy to connect related events and plan things.

This was the feature that allowed me to construct my own todo + calendar system where I can send tasks into the future to remind me when the day arrives or go back easily into the past to see how certain things unfolded.

ConnectedText date topics could do much of this, but the problem is they are not online, and so they harder to access when you need to work across multiple machines on different platforms in different locations. This is also why I can't switch to Logseq.

NotePlan does this very well, of course. But personally, I’ve found my preferred way of making rapid notes to myself is using an Inbox (in my case, in both Notebooks – for general info and stuff – and TickTick – for more task-related stuff), so I can then rapidly distribute the jottings in my Inbox to whichever day is most appropriate. The daily note thing I find particularly useful for journaling (Craft does this rather well, too).

Getting back to @Alan’s original point about backlinks – this is an interesting issue, I must say. Are they really as useful as people have been led to believe? And I’d have to say, as others in various forums have already said, that this depends on how you prefer to work. Clearly the original inventor of Zettelkasten, Luhmann, found them useful. But they aren’t some kind of ultimate cure-all – you have to read through backlinks just as you have to read through the citations or footnotes in an academic article.

Which is why I think the positioning of backlinks is so important – for my money, all apps that put them in a right-hand navigation bar (e.g. Obsidian, UpNote) have got the right idea (UpNote has one of the best, most useful right-hand navigation bars of any note-taking app – they make **full use** of it, rather than just using the top of it as a kind of fragment collection zone; actually, Curio does a good right-hand navigation bar, too). Putting backlinks right at the bottom of a note/article/document isn’t very helpful – you can only visualise relationships if you scroll right down to the bottom, which is tedious if, like me, you rely on very fast scan-reading to collect information on a subject at high speed (typical of a translation workflow). Something to think about/discuss, anyway!

Cheers!
Bill

Dr Andus wrote:

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>To me, the most important influence on note taking from Roam is the
idea
>of the Daily Note. Maybe Roam didn't invent that feature, but it seems
>to have popularized it. I think it is a very valuable addition.

Yes, it's a very simple idea, and in a way not that much different from
Google Calendar automatically advancing through time and always showing
you today's date.

One could manually re-create it every day in WorkFlowy, which I did try
in the past, but I just couldn't keep up with it. You forget to do it
one day, and inertia sets in, and the whole routine falls apart.

Also, psychologically it's helpful that Roam starts with a blank new
date every day. Because starting with reviewing yesterday's incomplete
todos may lead you down the wrong path. Having a blank slate allows you
to focus on today's priorities and reassess your previous priorities
later. You can still return to yesterday's incomplete todos and decide
whether they are worth revisiting or need to be moved further into the
future.

But another important feature is the date links themselves, given that
each date such as [[February 18th, 2022]] is a page and a link, and
therefore backlinks are also automatically produced wherever you insert
a date link, making it easy to connect related events and plan things.

This was the feature that allowed me to construct my own todo + calendar
system where I can send tasks into the future to remind me when the day
arrives or go back easily into the past to see how certain things
unfolded.

ConnectedText date topics could do much of this, but the problem is they
are not online, and so they harder to access when you need to work
across multiple machines on different platforms in different locations.
This is also why I can't switch to Logseq.

MadaboutDana wrote:

for my money, all apps that put them in a right-hand navigation bar
(e.g. Obsidian, UpNote) have got the right idea (UpNote has one
of the best, most useful right-hand navigation bars of any
note-taking app – they make **full use** of it, rather than just
using the top of it as a kind of fragment collection zone; actually,
Curio does a good right-hand navigation bar, too). Putting backlinks
right at the bottom of a note/article/document isn’t very helpful

I think that's a great point; it puts into words something I liked about some apps without quite realizing why.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Getting back to @Alan’s original point about backlinks
– this is an interesting issue, I must say. Are they really
as useful as people have been led to believe? And I’d have to say,
as others in various forums have already said, that this depends on how
you prefer to work. Clearly the original inventor of Zettelkasten,
Luhmann, found them useful. But they aren’t some kind of ultimate
cure-all – you have to read through backlinks just as you have to
read through the citations or footnotes in an academic article.

I have a hard time going back to anything without backlinks after using roam. The other core organizing feature is the block references though and these two things are amazing together.

Or for use old school note software nerds, Block References are transclusion at the paragraph level. Previous attempts at transclusion that have been at the page level (ultra recall etc).

This is the first app I've used where it is fun to have conversations with myself throughout my stuff.

Having just been playing with LogSeq, I wouldn't disagree. Embedding blocks (or even entire pages) has all sorts of possibilities – and, as you imply, is also bloody good fun!

nathanb wrote:

MadaboutDana wrote:

>Getting back to @Alan’s original point about backlinks
>– this is an interesting issue, I must say. Are they really
>as useful as people have been led to believe? And I’d have to
say,
>as others in various forums have already said, that this depends on how
>you prefer to work. Clearly the original inventor of Zettelkasten,
>Luhmann, found them useful. But they aren’t some kind of ultimate
>cure-all – you have to read through backlinks just as you have to
>read through the citations or footnotes in an academic article.
>
>

I have a hard time going back to anything without backlinks after using
roam. The other core organizing feature is the block references though
and these two things are amazing together.

Or for use old school note software nerds, Block References are
transclusion at the paragraph level. Previous attempts at transclusion
that have been at the page level (ultra recall etc).

This is the first app I've used where it is fun to have conversations
with myself throughout my stuff.