alt.hn

5/18/2025 at 6:36:54 PM

The Fall of Roam (2022)

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

by ingve

5/18/2025 at 9:39:01 PM

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.

by dzink

5/19/2025 at 7:28:38 AM

Another thing to add: I had deleted my Roam Research account a long time ago by now, but the media I uploaded on it is still available through the Firebase links.

by coldblues

5/20/2025 at 5:32:28 AM

Hey Baibhav from the Roam Engineering team here

I think this might be a remnant of the time we did not delete media for graphs for cases we thought they might've just migrated to a new graph. For context, a semi-common pattern was for users to export their graph and restore to a new graph, so that they can change the name. Could you have gone through a similar process before deleting your account?

If you please contact support@roamresearch.com and provide the firebase links (even just a few should be okay to find the media), then we can proceed with the deletion for you. Sorry for the issue

by baibhavbista

5/20/2025 at 5:28:09 AM

Hey,

I work at Roam on the engineering team.

I do not claim to know about this case, could you send me or support@roamresearch.com any more details you have re: this?

I can, however, tell you what the protocol has been since I've been working here at Roam (since 2021). No one can access user notes without an explicit written permission being granted. We have logs for when any graph is accessed via admins, and so, any member on the team accessing user notes without permission would be fired immediately. This was the operating policy and was made clear to me on my onboarding itself, along with the policy of immediate termination in the case of abuse.

Additionally, since Jan 2022, we have the ability for users to create End-to-end encrypted graphs. These graphs provide an extra level of protection - where your notes (& media) would be safe even in the worst case of Roam being hacked or compelled by law agencies to give info (to be clear, we haven't had either happen)

by baibhavbista

5/20/2025 at 8:40:48 PM

Hi Baibhav, This was in August 2020. I have attached screenshots as a reply to Josh's reply above. It was early in the days so I could understand the founder perusing as a way of seeing how users are using the site, but not some random dude with a gmail. The logs were showing in my local storage on the browser. My notes were just test notes, so I didn't have anything important to worry about, but I never used Roam as a result.

by dzink

5/21/2025 at 3:19:04 AM

Hey, clarifying (for anyone who sees this thread and not the other replies)

Roam actually DID NOT READ THEIR DATA (we have always had the policy of never accessing user data without explicit user permission). She just misunderstood what she was looking at.

More (verifiable) details in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44047945

by baibhavbista

5/20/2025 at 2:22:05 PM

Hi, co-founder of Roam, Josh here. I don't recall your case ever being brought up to me, but as Baibhav said in his comment, we have strict no-access rule for engineers. They (and me) are only allowed to open your graph if given explicit permission by you through support. We have always had this rule and it's in our terms and conditions.

I think I found your account and I don't see any access logs to your graph from anyone other than your account. If you can provide any more info or screenshots of we would be able to dig deeper into exactly what you saw. It could have been a console log or a hard coded employee email in the code.

We've always cared deeply about user's privacy and ownership over their notes. This is why we've had this policy from the start and focused heavily on local first features and data portability. We offer fully offline graphs, where the data never touches our server and is never able to be accessed by anyone on our team. We also offer fully encrypted graphs, which are stored on our servers but are not able to be read by anyone without the password (our team cannot read your data).

by hashbrown490

5/20/2025 at 8:18:32 PM

You are in luck. I found a little video I took of the screen when it happened. It was from Aug 11 2020. Here is a screenshot with the log details: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g9jv8eh1ugi5qda0c6azx/0811202...

by dzink

5/20/2025 at 8:35:10 PM

Here is another screenshot and screenshots of the email exchange with the person in the logs. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/v0x26d5jvou5k9gvx5tnd/IMG_205...

Emails: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s6ed1brrcvc0hncig7nm0/IMG_205...

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ohafavhr9nlqfedlbfxrd/IMG_206...

by dzink

5/21/2025 at 1:35:43 PM

Baibhav posted this screenshot down the thread, but I wanted to add some more context.

We followed up with our ex-employee to get the final (cutoff) message in this email thread https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/firescript-577a2...

In it he tries to explain that these are help graph transactions they are seeing. I do apologize if you didn't understand it at the time, but we did try to explain it to you. I Hope this clears up everything for anyone following along.

by hashbrown490

5/21/2025 at 12:09:33 AM

What the hell. Thank you for keeping the receipts. That's astonishingly not-ok.

by kstrauser

5/21/2025 at 3:16:19 AM

Hey, clarifying

Roam actually DID NOT READ THEIR DATA (we have always had the policy of never accessing user data without explicit user permission). She just misunderstood what she was looking at.

More (verifiable) details in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44047945

by baibhavbista

5/21/2025 at 4:56:27 AM

Got it. Not being an expert on that, I’ll take you at your word.

But in the spirit of constructive criticism, your user had been carrying that belief for 5 years now because no one explained it when they originally reported the finding.

by kstrauser

5/21/2025 at 4:00:22 AM

Thanks for sharing, see Baibhav's response for what happened here, these logs you are seeing are for the public help graph, not your personal graph.

by hashbrown490

5/21/2025 at 3:12:33 AM

Hey thank you for replying!

I understand what the screenshots are saying and this makes it clear that it was a misunderstanding and that NO ONE ACCESSED YOUR GRAPH(S). Please let me explain

Lets start with your first screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g9jv8eh1ugi5qda0c6azx/0811202...

If you take a look at this screenshot, it shows that the values you saw are in the indexeddb db "..._help-tx". The "help" bit denotes that those are the actions/txs taken in the "help" graph (which you can access via https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help). The reason you're seeing Bardia and Conor's emails there is because they wrote in the help graph (maybe they were writing guides there or adding stuff to the changelog). The reason the help graph data is in your indexedDB is because you probably opened the help graph at some point.

If someone had accessed your graphs, similar txs would have shown instead in the indexeddb dbs "..._DZ-tx" or "..._programming-with-categories-tx"

Everything I've said above can be verified if you say go to any Roam graph, and see what dbs are stored in IndexedDB in the devtools.

Hopefully this makes sense. Also, as Bardia replied in the email, we have never and will never edit user notes without explicit permission.

tl;dr: You thought you were looking at the logs for your graph but you were looking at the logs for the "help" graph. This is easily verifiable from your screenshots itself if you know where to look (details above).

by baibhavbista

5/21/2025 at 5:14:35 AM

Here is a video explanation and verification, in case the above is hard to follow: https://www.loom.com/share/2a0247ab163747508e28e4a79190583a

What is our fault that we did not clear up this misunderstanding immediately and I'm sorry for that dzink (I think this was during the time of Roam hypergrowth so maybe Bardia missed the later email reply?)

Hopefully, it is now clear that NO ONE accessed your graphs (and no graph is ever accessed without explicit user permission)

P.S. I took this video & wrote this message alongside my earlier one but could not post because HN said "You're posting too fast. Please slow down" XD. Hence the new account. Please do not block me because of this, mod

by baibhavbista5

5/21/2025 at 5:03:57 AM

If I were the user, I would’ve been unsatisfied with that answer. They had logs showing that yes, someone did appear to access their notes. No one seems to have corrected the misunderstanding at the time, which might’ve turned them back into a happy Roam user.

Don’t do that. Things like this are an opportunity to overcommunicate. Explain in detail to the user, who’s smart enough to use the tools to reveal the information in the first place. Write up a FAQ entry explaining this for the next person so you can point them right to it. Don’t just reply to say basically “you didn’t actually see that” and leave it at that.

by kstrauser

5/21/2025 at 5:30:48 AM

Thank you

Yes, definitely a communication misstep on our part, and we could've handled it much better

I have a second comment there too, but got delayed in posting because HN rate-limited my account for too many comments

by baibhavbista5

5/21/2025 at 5:45:44 AM

Edit: Thanks kstrauser, for letting cooler heads prevail (couldn't delete because this comment had your reply)

by baibhavbista5

5/21/2025 at 6:02:09 AM

Don’t do this. For real. Sleep on it, maybe even delete that, and come back fresh in the morning, letting cooler heads prevail. Losing your temper with a user would make you look bad, even if it turns out you’re correct.

This can wait until tomorrow.

by kstrauser

5/19/2025 at 12:18:53 AM

Wow, that's very icky.

by stevage

5/21/2025 at 3:16:48 AM

Hey, clarifying

Roam actually DID NOT READ THEIR DATA (we have always had the policy of never accessing user data without explicit user permission). She just misunderstood what she was looking at.

More (verifiable) details in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44047945

by baibhavbista

5/21/2025 at 6:47:12 AM

OK THANKS FOR LETTING ME KNOW

by stevage

5/21/2025 at 8:18:53 AM

sorry for the all caps, my bad

by baibhavbista

5/19/2025 at 4:11:23 AM

Would you be open to providing some more details on this? Was this a private graph or a public graph?

by arbus5672

5/19/2025 at 5:14:30 AM

It happened several years ago - when Conor was holding talks on Clubhouse. I had created an account with a few test notes and went back days later. The notes were not listed or linked anywhere. The person’s email or name was showing in the log but he was not even outed as an employee on linkedin at the time - so I originally thought someone has hacked my account or was accidentally given access to my notes. Then I asked the founder or the person and they said it was a new employee. I have screenshots somewhere but I don’t remember how i reached out to them - if it was a service chat, or email, or twitter, or clubhouse. I always check the network chatter on new sites I use - very enlightening about what they think of customers. A lot of times you see flags for things they want you or don’t want you to be, or what they want to upsell to you. Reactive sites put all kinds of logic in the front end where it doesn’t belong.

by dzink

5/19/2025 at 5:24:44 AM

Thanks for elaborating! This is definitely not ok, and the response beyond unacceptable.

I've been an active user for a couple of years now and have substantial amount of information stored in Roam. I guess I should have known better than to have sensitive data stored in someone else's servers without encryption.

Time to explore Obsidian and see what the migration path looks like.

by arbus5672

5/21/2025 at 3:18:19 AM

Hey, thanks for being an active Roam users for these years.

I want to clarify this (since you might not see the other replies in this thread)

Roam actually DID NOT READ THEIR DATA (we have always had the policy of never accessing user data without explicit user permission). She just misunderstood what she was looking at.

More (verifiable) details in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44047945

by baibhavbista

5/19/2025 at 1:23:47 AM

That does seem very shady, did you at least get a written apology from him/his boss?

by MichaelZuo

5/19/2025 at 7:55:13 PM

Forget an apology, was there any accountability?

Have they clamped down on employee access? Was this "new employee" let go for accessing user data without any apparent reason?

by radicaldreamer

5/20/2025 at 5:34:53 AM

Hey, Baibhav from the Roam Engineering team here

Relevant reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038085

by baibhavbista

5/21/2025 at 3:17:18 AM

Final relevant reply here:

Roam actually DID NOT READ THEIR DATA (we have always had the policy of never accessing user data without explicit user permission). She just misunderstood what she was looking at.

More (verifiable) details in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44047945

by baibhavbista

5/18/2025 at 7:59:04 PM

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.

by mark242

5/18/2025 at 8:23:54 PM

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.

by medstrom

5/18/2025 at 11:14:08 PM

Yes.

IMO the 3 table-stakes features for a notetaking app in 2025 are AI-powered search (including a question-answering capability), showing related / recommended notes (via RAG), and automated clustering (K Means + LLM) to maintain a category hierarchy.

by miki123211

5/18/2025 at 8:18:49 PM

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.

by zipy124

5/18/2025 at 11:44:10 PM

I'd love to have this but only if it runs entirely on my own machine or on a server I own. Uploading all my notes to somebody else's cloud is a nonstarter.

Can Ollama do this yet?

by dreamcompiler

5/19/2025 at 12:07:23 AM

I'm not a huge fan of bringing AI into everything but as I was reading the blog post, it did feel like this is the place where it belongs.

by stevage

5/18/2025 at 8:47:45 PM

> 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...

by getnormality

5/19/2025 at 3:21:16 AM

Yes! Keep it simple. Start w/ a daily note. Write stuff as you go. Extract from DN into a dedicated (transcluded) note when you reach the point where you're later searching for it across more than a couple DNs, or if you're confident that's going to happen. By default, I recommend a strong bias towards simplicity, w/ chronological, low-friction entries. "Where does it go" becomes moot if you are in your Daily Note: just write it here, now, and optionally extract it later only if/when doing so provides obvious benefit.

by chrisweekly

5/18/2025 at 11:40:00 PM

the problem with any categorization is having to choose one and exactly one category. that's why i prefer tagging. i don't need to choose a specific category, instead i add any tag that fits.

by em-bee

5/18/2025 at 8:39:00 PM

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.

by kouru225

5/19/2025 at 4:45:11 AM

I like Obsidian.[1] For organization, I like the PARA method.[2] I do also have my addition on top such as "0-Inbox" where un-sorted files lands. Otherwise, search and opening files directly via the keyboard shortcut in Obsidian works most of the times. But that would be just me, I'm known to be pretty organized (people told me many times). Wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me where something is and I'm likely to tell you exactly where to find it. I learned that trick from an uncle growing up.

Steph Ango, CEO of Obsidian, has a nice article on how he uses Obsidian.[3]

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/obsidian/

2. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/

3. https://stephango.com/vault

by Brajeshwar

5/19/2025 at 12:54:36 AM

How can you organize stuff in obsidian? You have folders and search and that's it. I was thinking of switching from Word docs and putting my faith in backlinks to keep everything together, but now I'm not sure.

by Noumenon72

5/19/2025 at 1:53:41 AM

> How can you organize stuff in obsidian? You have folders and search and that's it.

You can use folders, tags, properties, links between notes (exporable through the links panel per file or the graph view), and there are extensions that let you add more advanced functionality. In the end, any system will require you to come up with your own system of organization.

by TheFreim

5/19/2025 at 2:28:24 AM

My strategy of dumping various notes in a semicoherently-named directory tree and then grepping through them makes me feel like a caveman, but it works for me. I feel that tools like this are overcomplicating things.

by podunkPDX

5/18/2025 at 10:28:50 PM

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

by canvascritic

5/18/2025 at 11:05:28 PM

Aren't you describing (and Roam using) what is essentially brain mapping, which is a well-established technology based on how our memories actually work?

by mmooss

5/18/2025 at 11:08:49 PM

I'm not a fan of neurophysiology analogies because it veer into pseudoscience, but I'll play along.

Roam implemented static bidirectional links and called it associative memory. in reality, it's closer to mind-mapping software with backlinks. So without mechanisms for reinforcement (surfacing old notes intelligently), pruning (forgetting irrelevant junk), or plasticity (reorganizing in response to use), the system becomes a junkyard of half-formed thoughts.

Brains forget for a reason, roam doesn't

by canvascritic

5/19/2025 at 1:17:01 AM

> Brains forget for a reason, roam doesn't

I think this is the key mistake in Roam's design (and in many ways, obsidian and friends). They appeal to a dream some people have that maybe if you never forget anything, you'll get smarter forever. (Or something like that).

The problem is that there's many benefits to having a mind which forgets things. That property lets us grow and change over time - and move on from old ideas or old ways of thinking. Not necessarily because they're bad; but because we become a different person from the person who had that thought.

Trauma is an extreme case of this. Its essentially a disorder of memory; where we etch some old memory in stone. Because we don't let ourselves forget it, we inevitably build structure / thought patterns around that memory. "This one time __" - "As a result, deep down I believe that I am fundamentally ___ (unsafe / unworthy / stupid / unlovable / ...)". Trauma work is in many ways a slow process of learning to unclench your mind from those past experiences, to allow yourself to "move on" from them. (Ie, forget the emotional impact they have today.)

Its also kind of obvious in software or architecture. You can't just keep adding to an old structure forever. Software gets harder to build the bigger it gets. Same with buildings, books, teams and more. If everything new needs to fit with everything that has come before, its an O(n^2) job. Of course roam suffers from this too. The default "remember everything forever" default is naive and silly. Our brains don't work best like that.

by josephg

5/19/2025 at 7:35:00 AM

There is no reason to forget. Your brain does memory crystallization whether you like it or not, this is not something that is up to you. There is no upper bound to memory as far as we know. https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Spaced_repetition_memory_sys...

You are just making a very silly "Appeal to nature" argument. Your notes, just as your memories, change and morph. For your memories, every time you access them, for your notes, every time you notice something you could improve. Old notes should not bother you, just ignore them if they're not relevant. They take a negligible amount of space on your devices. Personally, every note I've taken serves a purpose, even if their purpose is to just fill a spot so that I may be continually aware I've tackled a particular subject before even if it has not had any relevance for years.

by coldblues

5/19/2025 at 9:32:41 AM

> There is no reason to forget. [...] You are just making a very silly "Appeal to nature" argument.

I don't see it that way. I see it as a healthy, useful expression of continuous death.

In software, we don't start every program by first importing every line of code ever written. Why not? The computer has room for all that code. Why don't we import it all into our workspace? The reason, in my mind, is that each line of code in a computer program has a cognitive cost to it. A sort of, conceptual gravity, which makes reaching for further away ideas much more difficult.

When brainstorming, often a blank page is the best canvas for a new idea. We start companies with new stationary. New workbooks. We even have sayings for this - "Blue sky thinking" or "Greenfield projects". Ie, projects which don't inherit older, more established structures or code.

There's a balance of course. We also don't start everything from scratch either. In code we pull in libraries as we need them, and lean on our programming languages and operating systems. But you have to strike the right balance between new and old. Too much old and you're stifled by it. Too much new and you're trying to boil the ocean.

I think humans are like that too. I think our ability to crystalize new thoughts depends on our capacity to let go of old ones. I don't think the best minds spend their lives hoarding all the best knowledge. For my money, the old people I like the most are people who can be in the here and now. Knowledgable, sure. But also present. Open to surprise. Philosophically you want to combine whats happening right now with the best ideas from the past. And let the rest go.

At least, that's how I think of it for myself. If I'm a different person in 20 years from who I am now, I wish whoever I become the best of luck. I hope for them to be unburdened by all the cognitive misadventure I'm probably going through right now.

by josephg

5/19/2025 at 2:49:25 PM

>There is no upper bound to memory as far as we know

That's physically impossible.

by meindnoch

5/19/2025 at 3:45:48 PM

Correct. What I meant specifically is that we are unaware of a hard limit to memory, one that we have not found due to factors like our lifespans and cognitive decline, so it should not be something to worry and fuss over due to its current irrelevancy.

by coldblues

5/19/2025 at 4:17:33 AM

I personally find pleasure in reading my old notes, even ones that contain outdated ways of thinking, incorrect assumptions, etc. If anything, it helps me reflect on the growth that's occurred. I agree it's not necessarily productive to log everything all the time, though.

by accrual

5/19/2025 at 7:30:44 AM

Me too. But again, its nice to re-read old notes which are "lost to time". The author of this piece is clearly finding the past is actively influencing the present:

> 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'll never work if you can't leave things behind.

by josephg

5/19/2025 at 2:16:32 AM

I write things down to forget. Once it's written, it's safe to forget.

by Buttons840

5/19/2025 at 2:47:15 AM

Yeah me too! But old notebooks can just be left on the shelf and forgotten. I don’t think that’s reall true of roam. At least, not how a lot of people use it.

by josephg

5/18/2025 at 11:31:48 PM

You can't delete things?

Really, I think the user in that case needs to be much more choosy about what they put in the database. It will save them time and greatly improve the signal-to-noise ration.

by mmooss

5/18/2025 at 11:54:15 PM

Deleting takes a lot of mental and emotional energy.

Going through all your notes regularly and asking “should I delete this? Does it bring me joy?”

by jimbokun

5/19/2025 at 3:21:06 AM

> Going through all your notes regularly and asking “should I delete this? Does it bring me joy?”

I'd just delete things opportunistically, as you come across them. If you aren't coming across them, there's no value in deleting them.

by mmooss

5/18/2025 at 8:49:55 PM

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.

by 0_gravitas

5/19/2025 at 3:34:20 PM

Same. It's great. And I set Logseq to use Org format instead of MD in case I ever want or need to move my notes into Org Roam proper (e.g. if Logseq goes kaput someday).

by rgreeko42

5/19/2025 at 1:05:05 AM

> When I write my notes the thought, ‘Where am I going to put this?’ plagues me every time.

This is so true. Regardless of how useful note taking actually is, the kind of people using these apps are those who like the idea of having everything "perfectly organized" - and this friction and uncertainty of where to put notes gets in the way of that. I'm the same. Every time I know that I don't have a proper place for a note I stop taking notes alltogether. I guess that's for the better.

by loveparade

5/19/2025 at 2:11:34 AM

The author began to realise the truth: that the quality of his writing is very low on average. Then he moved away from that realisation to the thought that Roam or some other kind of automation could somehow save him.

Perhaps what he needs is for the tool to automatically ask him "Is it okay to delete this note from 60 days ago?" That should be long enough for him to lose any attachment to what he wrote and a lot of the time he should say yes, and delete the crap.

by HungSu

5/18/2025 at 8:12:15 PM

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

by m3kw9

5/19/2025 at 10:06:04 AM

Similar to Logseq. They are both built with Clojure.

by sakesun

5/19/2025 at 12:03:25 PM

What are you implying by that?

by balencpp

5/18/2025 at 8:47:36 PM

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.

by swah

5/19/2025 at 12:36:06 AM

> 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

I debunked this myth on the prior discussion in 2022. Backlinks were a well-known idea in the wiki community, to the point that they were part of WikiMatrix, and it's almost certainly the case that Roam copied the idea. TiddlyWiki had backlinks at least as early as 2006. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330835

by bachmeier

5/19/2025 at 3:59:52 AM

I'm surprised to this day everyone still focuses on backlinks.

For me Roam's killer feature was transclusion. When they launched, no one else had it. I could write all my notes in the daily notes and still have a sufficiently-well-organised knowledge base for specific subjects, tasks, projects.

These days I use obsidian for the simplicity/portability of .md.

by dalmo3

5/19/2025 at 12:16:15 PM

> For me Roam's killer feature was transclusion. When they launched, no one else had it.

Roam also copied the idea of transclusion. I'm not sure who is included in "no one else" but Wikipedia's had it pretty much from the beginning. See this page from 2005[1]

The term was coined in a book in 1980[2]. This page from 2007[3] says "...CvWiki, developed in 1997 by Peter Merel, which was the first Wiki clone to have functioning transclusion, backlinks and WayBackMode."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Transcl...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion#History_and_imple...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_wikis&...

by bachmeier

5/19/2025 at 8:21:18 PM

Thanks for the history lesson, I guess, but that's extremely pedantic. No one ever said Roam invented transclusion.

I'm talking in the practical sense here. It's hard to take you seriously when you mention Wikipedia in the context of personal note taking apps.

by dalmo3

5/20/2025 at 10:45:47 AM

Why? Using a wiki to take notes is not a particularly weird or novel idea.

by detaro

5/18/2025 at 8:04:35 PM

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?

by zahlman

5/19/2025 at 3:33:02 AM

I have never used Roam before, but I've been happily using an Emacs package called org-roam [0] for the past couple of years. When paired with org-roam-ui [1], it provides everything I need: basic linking, timestamped notes, and a graph view of all my notes. If you're an Emacs user or have used Roam in the past, I highly recommend giving them a try!

[0]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

[1]: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-ui

by 8s2ngy

5/18/2025 at 10:35:25 PM

In 2020 so many people recommended this to me in support of my writing and related research. But my laziness saved me.

by paulorlando

5/18/2025 at 10:19:26 PM

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.

by vvpan

5/18/2025 at 11:09:34 PM

Hierarchies vary based on the application and your point of view. For example, let's say you have an entry for beer bottles. Does that go under beer or under bottles, or under glass-making or Charlie's hobbies or something else?

And your perspective today might differ tomorrow or in a year or 20 years. Think about Wikipedia (and other wikis) - there is no hierarchy. You can start at any point and, in a sense, there's a hierarchy of pages with the starting point at the top.

by mmooss

5/19/2025 at 2:18:06 AM

I think you have 2 issues with content based systems: you have ambiguity (in archiving and retrieval) and you have to use mental effort to resolve that ambiguity.

The Dewey decimal system has less ambiguity in both, and an alphabetical system would be unambiguous for archiving (if not retrieval).

I prefer to organize my notes functionally (eg internal emails, blog posts, links to read, reading notes) and then rely on search for retrieval. It’s not perfect but it lowers the friction, which I think is very important.

by singhrac

5/19/2025 at 3:20:03 AM

> I think you have 2 issues with content based systems: you have ambiguity (in archiving and retrieval) and you have to use mental effort to resolve that ambiguity.

True, but .......

Full-text search solves many problems. And hyperlinks enable knowledge to be in multiple places at once and even remain normalized (i.e., it can be in other locations by reference). If your kb has an efficient 'include' functionality, it's even easier.

Most importantly, if you are using your kb well (by my definition [0]), you record high-quality knowledge that you've already engaged deeply with. If you can't solve the content ambiguity issue easily, it's just a sign that you haven't engaged and don't know it well enough.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44025080

by mmooss

5/19/2025 at 12:14:13 AM

I suppose my observation is that I have never seen anybody actually have enough of notes for long enough of time (cannot imagine needing any of mine in a few years) for this to be a problem. Those people likely exist but I have not met them.

by vvpan

5/19/2025 at 1:03:29 AM

The major case I'm facing is in a large company: meetings, projects, and people all get different kinds of notes, yet they're all linked: people attend meetings, projects have demos, people move to new projects. You need a graph of links, not a hierarchy like learning notes.

by Noumenon72

5/19/2025 at 10:54:56 AM

I see the appeal of wanting to link things, but even then I find information to be so context dependent that I just do hierarchical notes anyway.

Like if you want to brush up python for interviews, you're gonna want to take notes about specific things like heaps and string builders. You don't want to dilute that info with stuff you know will never be asked in an interview like how to build a TUI.

by maximus-decimus

5/18/2025 at 11:24:30 PM

The founder raised $8M on Wefunder and seems too have taken it and run. He hasn't provided any updates for a few years now.

by mattm

5/19/2025 at 7:44:02 AM

This is factually incorrect and can easily be disproved by looking at the change logs.

by coldblues

5/19/2025 at 12:24:34 AM

Roam seemed to depend too much on legends about a guy who was a hyper genius. Roam's implicit promise was that if you use the hyper genius's method then you'll become a hyper genius too.

by sandspar

5/18/2025 at 7:46:28 PM

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)

by dbuxton

5/18/2025 at 10:26:48 PM

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.

by bccdee

5/18/2025 at 10:54:51 PM

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.)

by allenu

5/19/2025 at 12:38:14 AM

Roam got me so frustrated I spent 3 years and likely many more making an html/htmx ai first replacement. It’s still pretty raw, but it does everything I want and more. https://grugnotes.com

by keizo

5/18/2025 at 8:21:00 PM

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

by williamscales

5/19/2025 at 4:05:20 AM

No kidding about that pasta photo being an instant dopamine hit! Is that cacio e pepe with an egg yolk and green onions?

by bschwindHN

5/19/2025 at 12:53:06 AM

Roam’s product people sprinted to the 100m line with what they built at the start, but then Notion’s product people ambled past them and went on to run a full marathon.

Roam also took absurdly long to finish loading, long enough to lose my train of thought and get angry at Roam instead of writing down what I wanted to write down. I would write it in Sublime Text while Roam loaded, then paste it in. Then wonder why I was bothering with Roam when I could’ve already saved a text file with my note, to a directory somewhere.

Do you think Roam’s team fixed the performance problems? Ha.

by cadamsdotcom

5/18/2025 at 11:29:32 PM

> 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.

IMHO you may need to produce much better quality knowledge. You are missing out.

A good KB - personal or shared - captures high-value knowledge and lets you pickup where you left off, years later, with little effort. That way you are always working with the best knowledge you've ever had. What defines high-value?

First, it's high-impact - it changes things in significant ways: Trivia about C++'s origins is unlikely to be worthwhile; something from an expert that changes your whole perspective about C++'s design and applications may be. Also it's accurate, high-quality knowledge; otherwise the impact will be much reduced or it may even be significant in the wrong way - for example, Wikipedia IMHO doesn't qualify (in other ways too), but a lit review by an expert can be priceless.

Second, it's hard to replace: 1) Discovery is unlikely: you are unlikely to think of or encounter it next time, at least not unless you revisit the issue in depth. 2) It's hard to find - even if you think of it, you won't be able to find it or recreate it easily. Maybe it's buried in a book you won't remember. For example, if you have info on operating systems, you need little about Windows, Android, etc. because you use them daily (hypothetically) and info is easily available. Insights on TempleOS might be better, or from that keynote by Dennis Ritchie that you attended.

By capturing the value, you get much greater ROI - a lifetime or career of it - from your knowledge work. That also incentivizes deep, high-value knowledge work.

by mmooss