[HN Gopher] Roam, Twenty Years Before Roam
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       Roam, Twenty Years Before Roam
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2023-01-29 08:56 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (borretti.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (borretti.me)
        
       | actuallyalys wrote:
       | Not only Mediawiki but also wikis specifically for managing
       | personal information like Zim Wiki and Tiddlywiki have backlinks.
       | It'd be interesting to see an article exploring why Roam and
       | other recent entrants seem to have been more successful than
       | these wikis. (Assuming they are. I don't have hard user counts to
       | compare.)
        
         | dividedbyzero wrote:
         | At least for me: Speed. Roam is _fast_. I couldn't imagine
         | using a Wiki that has lots of page loads in all sorts of flows
         | because even from localhost, that just takes too long and feels
         | too disruptive, this is one case where a fast SPA really
         | shines. Also, they got things like autocomplete pretty much
         | right, which many Wikis don't have at all. I still find Roam a
         | bit cumbersome (why can't I set my graph to case-insensitive
         | titles?) but the Wikis I've tried have been a lot less
         | streamlined, and as I need to take notes pretty much all the
         | time, little delays and annoyances add up. I'm told org-mode in
         | emacs would be a better experience still, but trying to learn
         | emacs has been one of the most unpleasant things I've ever done
         | with a computer, so I guess I'll stick with Roam or whatever
         | comes around to take its place. It's the first notes app
         | product that feels somewhat right-ish to me.
        
       | buttocks wrote:
       | > The release of Roam was a Cambrian explosion in the previously
       | moribund field of personal information management
       | 
       | What an astounding claim. I guess if I had even heard of Roam up
       | to this point, it might be less astounding.
        
         | dividedbyzero wrote:
         | At least in my circles Roam has been absolutely impossible to
         | miss even if living under a rock. Before Roam, people around me
         | used either Evernote or OneNote or some kind of text files in
         | directories scheme, all of which apparently sucks for other
         | people just as much as they do for me.
         | 
         | Most are now on Roam or Obsidian, and I hear that at least in
         | some in scientific circles Roam has made an even bigger splash.
         | I've tried Roam and Obsidian and a few copycats and stuck with
         | Roam, and it's lightyears ahead of what I had before, but there
         | seems to be no good way to interface with the graph using code
         | and that's limiting things severely for me. Still looking for
         | something better, but IMO it's absolutely fair to say that Roam
         | has had a huge impact.
        
         | jononomo wrote:
         | Have you been following the field of personal information
         | management closely these last few years?
        
           | Pulcinella wrote:
           | If you have so much personal information that you need
           | specialized software to help you manage it, you have too
           | much.
        
       | trynewideas wrote:
       | MediaWiki admins get a ton a value out of reverse links, and it's
       | always been weird how little Wikipedia uses them. The wiki
       | wormhole goes both ways!
        
       | wwkeyboard wrote:
       | I wonder why https://www.thebrain.com/ didn't get more traction,
       | it seems to check all the boxes.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-29 23:00 UTC)