Comment by kevinslin
3 years ago
tldr: roam's defining feature, bi-directional links, sound great in theory but break down in practice. if you rely on them as your primary means of finding notes, it quickly breaks down because there's no canonical starting point (by design)
Thought this was a great write-up of the missing link with roam and tools like it. They make it incredibly easy to add notes but after a while, make it incredibly difficult to find those notes again when needed
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of https://dendron.so/, a YC backed PKM tool focused on hierarchies and structured note-taking
Wrote a tweet thread about my takeaways from the article here: https://twitter.com/kevins8/status/1493020520815546368?s=20&...
> bi-directional links, sound great in theory but break down in practice. if you rely on them as your primary means of finding notes
There's some sleight of hand here, suggesting that bi-directional links were proposed as one's "primary" entry point to notes. Every bi-directional link aware app I've used has a global search feature, and most have a daily journal. Bi-directional links is a strictly additive concept, not mutually exclusive with simple search, daily journals, or even hierarchies.
> after a while, make it incredibly difficult to find those notes again when needed
This wasn't my experience, though. Maybe because I don't put everything there like braindumps, I can find what I need very quickly, it is enough to remember some tag, or just use Search. (Note: I use Roam free alternative called Logseq, but it works almost identically).