(2022-02-12) Shipper The Fall Of Roam

Dan Shipper: The Fall of Roam. I used to use Roam every day, but I don’t use it much anymore.

But where did we actually go? At least for me—and most of the people I know—we got a garbage dump full of crufty links and pieces of text we hardly ever revisit. And we feel guilty and sad about it.

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. Roam’s job was to get rid of that pain. And it did—for a while. But now it’s back.

If I plotted out the percent of my time writing bidirectional links vs. actually looking at my notes and clicking through the links in them, this is what I estimate it would look like:

• I can't imagine not reviewing, refining, and remixing notes. Backlinks is all it takes for that. See also Notice Patterns And Garden Your Private Wiki Notebook.

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. (This seems surprising, that a thinker/writer wouldn't want to review notes and references...)

After some time though, reality started to sink in. ‘I am not really going back through all of these notes as often as I thought I would.’ My next automatic assumption is that if they were just organized better I might go through them more. And so, the question starts to creep in again. ‘Where should I put this?’

Once I’m back to thinking this way, all sorts of other problems that I have with Roam start to creep in. ‘Where is the mobile app?’ And, ‘why doesn’t it feel like the product is improving? And, ‘why does everything feel like a mess?’ All of these problems were present, but none were important so long as I believed Roam was solving my core issue

Today, this is my stack:
Daily Diary / paper notebook
Book Notes / split between Roam and Muse
To-do List / Things
Meeting Notes / Apple Notes

The easiest way for Roam to fix this would be to improve the search function.

Automated Taxonomy

Of course, this could be solved by a better note-taking system on my part. Something closer to the actual Zettelkasten ideal that I’d like to strive for. But ideally, the software helps where I fall down.

The underlying genius of Roam is that it is structured not like a tool, but like a programming language. It’s based on the insight that the best way to organize information depends on how you’re going to use it, and that information can be used in an infinite number of ways.

As I wrote about 2 years ago in the Opportunity in Productivity, I still have a feeling that the way forward lives in more automation. (I think he's wrong about this.)