This blog post says nothing about why Roam is actually cool. It seems like a waste of opportunity, given that it has reached the front page and it's not really telling anyone why they should use it.
I have seen people praise Roam because of different features. Some say the ability to link concepts bidirectionally allows them to create the wiki they always wish they had, only now they can look at every single context where a topic has been mentioned. Others love the ability to use logic constructs to query chunks of text depending on their tags and content. For me personally, it's the ability to reference any fragment of the text so that it lives in multiple places at the same time. Hence, I can reuse ideas in different contexts. Alternatively, if I'm looking at a specific idea, I can tell where it's being drawn upon.
I have been using Roam every day for the last 2 months, and it has completely changed my note-taking habits. I have always strived to digitize all my thoughts, but for me, it never felt like I was fully engaged with my note-taking, Roam changed that. Because the main view is a daily page, it invites you to pour everything right there, relieving you of the duty of having to think if something's well placed under a hierarchy of folders. If you link your thoughts, then your thoughts will not get lost.
A cult is a cult when the members can't shut up about the cult and Roam is making a lot of noise right now.
Author here! I didn’t mean to write a comprehensive overview of Roam, I was just curious about the marketing decisions of products that attain cult status. I get that this is not nearly the most important aspect of Roam. Just a little thing I was personally interested in!
> it's the ability to reference any fragment of the text so that it lives in multiple places at the same time.
I've seen Roam being mentioned as a graph database for notes before but your comment helps me see it! Would this be a good working model - each `note` entry is logged to a central table in something like a relational database and each `page` is a materialised view over that relation. In contrast, for most of the other note taking apps, the abstraction for a note seems closer to a file.
Would be fun to implement something that works locally with an embeddable graph database library.
Zettelkasten is the original name of the concept of networked note-taking. It even worked on paper. Roam took the concept close to users with a polished UI. Some history: https://fortelabs.co/blog/how-to-take-smart-notes/
> Zettelkasten is the original name of the concept of networked note-taking.
No, it's not. Zettelkasten is just the german word for "Box of paper slips", a common tool for certain people. There are many famous Paperboxes from artists and scientist over the centuries, but the ojne responsable for this new zettelkasten-cargo-cult would be Luhmanns Zettelkasten.
Niklas Luhmann was a sociologist who had the habbit to gather notes to an excessiv level on paper slips and collect those in boxes. He was famous because he used common organizing-methods of scientist for notes, instead of just quotes, books and articles.
Some years ago serious research started about his notes, which are now all scaned and online available, and since then some kind of irrational cargo-cult around him has started.
I have seen people praise Roam because of different features. Some say the ability to link concepts bidirectionally allows them to create the wiki they always wish they had, only now they can look at every single context where a topic has been mentioned. Others love the ability to use logic constructs to query chunks of text depending on their tags and content. For me personally, it's the ability to reference any fragment of the text so that it lives in multiple places at the same time. Hence, I can reuse ideas in different contexts. Alternatively, if I'm looking at a specific idea, I can tell where it's being drawn upon.
I have been using Roam every day for the last 2 months, and it has completely changed my note-taking habits. I have always strived to digitize all my thoughts, but for me, it never felt like I was fully engaged with my note-taking, Roam changed that. Because the main view is a daily page, it invites you to pour everything right there, relieving you of the duty of having to think if something's well placed under a hierarchy of folders. If you link your thoughts, then your thoughts will not get lost.
A cult is a cult when the members can't shut up about the cult and Roam is making a lot of noise right now.