[HN Gopher] The Fall of Roam
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The Fall of Roam
Author : ingve
Score : 68 points
Date : 2025-05-18 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (every.to)
(TXT) w3m dump (every.to)
| dbuxton wrote:
| 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)
| mark242 wrote:
| 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.
| zipy124 wrote:
| I think this might be the most exciting use-case of LLM's I've
| seen suggested here. I've struggled with exactly this problem
| with note-taking and personal knowledge-bases.
| medstrom wrote:
| But... backlinks _are_ fully automated. If you just make
| forward-links that you 'd normally do in the course of writing.
|
| You're thinking of an optional step of adding extra links "just
| because", but IMO that's as a learning process in the beginning
| when you're not used to adding any forward-links whatsoever.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| 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
| williamscales wrote:
| 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
| kouru225 wrote:
| 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.
| swah wrote:
| 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.
| getnormality wrote:
| > 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...
| 0_gravitas wrote:
| 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.
| mrngm wrote:
| [2022], earlier discussion at the time (109 points, 103
| comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30320977
| dzink wrote:
| 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.
| vvpan wrote:
| 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.
| bccdee wrote:
| 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.
| allenu wrote:
| I agree. For most people, having a zero-friction way of
| recording a short thought or idea and being able to search for
| it later is more important than creating a vast network of
| connections. Tagging is "good enough" for most needs.
|
| I ended up building my own app for my notes and it turned into
| a chronological feed of short notes, like a social media feed.
| I just recently added linking between notes, but honestly, I've
| found that it's not essential. Just having a way to search by
| text and tag covers most of my needs. The chronological order
| also makes it easy to find stuff that I wrote recently or to
| filter by date.
|
| Since there are no files or folders, there's also zero friction
| when it comes to recording something. I don't need to think
| "Where should this go?" or "Is there already a folder or a
| larger note this should be a part of?" I think that has
| honestly led me to just down more thoughts and ideas than if I
| was trying to maintain a strict structure to everything. (There
| are downsides to that, though, as it may mean I have more noise
| in my system, making it harder to find actual notes of value
| long term.)
| canvascritic wrote:
| 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
| paulorlando wrote:
| In 2020 so many people recommended this to me in support of my
| writing and related research. But my laziness saved me.
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