The Fall of Roam

Summary

I used to use Roam every day, but I don’t use it much anymore. Based on what I can see on Twitter, and a casual survey of friends, I don’t think I’m alone.A year ago, the idea of networking our notes with bi-directional links became the biggest thing in the tools for thought space since Vannevar Bush described the memex. Top-down hierarchies and tag systems became the pet explanation du jour for everything that was wrong with note-taking. So we all hustled on to the Double-Bracket Express determined to build our own networked knowledge graphs. 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.(It is a very appealing looking garbage dump, however.)There are probably a host of reasons why this happened: Roam’s product velocity seems to be incredibly slow, there still isn’t really a good mobile experience, they’ve had well-documented community issues—the list goes on.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.. . .The core idea that caught on with Roam is the concept of a bidirectional link. Previous note-taking systems allowed linking in only one direction: you could link from one note to another, but the note being linked to had no automatic link back to the original note.Bi-directional linking, by contrast, creates a link from the first note to the second, and from the second to the first automatically. Roam made this extremely easy to accomplish—just by typing pieces of your notes in [[ brackets ]] you could link between notes, and even create new ones if the note you were...