The Fall of Roam

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 com ... Read full article.