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  • The fall of Roam

    Published on
    April 9th, 2022
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    I don’t use Roam anymore. Why?
    Dan Shipper is an entrepreneur, writer, and the co-founder and CEO of Every, a bundle of business-focused newsletters, founded in 2020. Find him on Twitter: @danshipper. This post was co-written by Dan and Kieran O'Hare.
    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.
    This is an excerpt from a Every.to.

    Read the full story here.

    Comments (12)
    Deej Tulleken
    The inevitability of this article's title feels like Roam was always tempting fate. I haven't used Roam, but I've toyed with Obsidian and Mem without any real commitment. I like the concept of bi-directional links, but it's not vital (I've tried to hack an approximation of this into Notion in the past). I actually like categorising and compartmentalising things myself if the system is accommodating enough. I use Notion for fairly structured notes, like phased learning for a language (whether it be Spanish or C#) or a knowledge system (moved a bunch of process guides and employee handbook type stuff to Notion for my team and it works really well). Small notes, fragments, and things there aren't really a place for yet have traditionally gone into Evernote, but Notion is absorbing some of this as well. Evernote is very much a text-only tool for me. In the past, URLs would be a big part of what I was using Evernote for, but Raindrop has taken over in that capacity for me. Eagle is my favourite tool for categorising images and design resources, and Milanote 2.0 has an edge for me when it comes to visual bookmarking over Notion (if layout and control of space is very important). Workona has some interesting features for merging static resources and bookmarks. In my head, something like Obsidian was meant to replace a lot of this Second Brain stack, but I never really got to grips with how I was going to achieve that without adding to my cognitive load instead of subtracting from it.
    Tem Nugmanov
    @deejtulleken I just found out about Heptabase (https://heptabase.com/) yesterday. Really interesting because it combines a few interesting features from Notion, Miro and Roam. I couldn't stick to those bi-directional text only tools in the past but this feels different.
    Deej Tulleken
    @temirlan Thanks, will check it out. Looks similar to Clover.
    Anna Filou
    @deejtulleken @temirlan just found this! How do you feel about Heptabase 7 months later?
    Suhas Gundimeda
    I stopped using Roam in the initial 15 days or so. Primarily because of the lack of timestamps and temporal context, which was one of the problems you mentioned. I currently just write out everything on Keybase, and it has worked reasonably well for me, apart from the lack of fuzzy search and bad UX for tag based systems. The lack of bidirectional links I solve with tags and common words, all the notes related to a thing will have that tag. The context when searching is temporal, which is generally enough for me. I think e2e encryption is important, so it's likely that Signal or Keybase storage-backed apps can fill this need. Alternative tools like Worldbrain's Memex and Anki form the rest of my knowledge stack.
    Melissa McEwen
    Glitch Discord Starter Kit
    Glitch Discord Starter Kit
    I'm really enjoying Foam (https://github.com/foambubble/foam) because as a programmer I already live in VSCode and Foam also lives there. And weirdly CoPilot occasionally gives me useful suggestions. Also because it's open source, if there is something I don't like, I can change it myself. That said, that flexibility can be a burden if you're spending all day tinkering with it instead of doing your work, which is a temptation for me. Also no mobile app OFC though Github now has Codespaces and I've been meaning to try it with that.
    Ulysse Mizrahi
    The timing is almost too good - as we're launching our product on PH today with the goal to solve precisely what Roam and other note-taking / todo apps fail to do. Take a look :) would love your feedback Mindmesh
    Sanjukt Saha
    The WALLOBOOKS Project
    The WALLOBOOKS Project
    LOL :)