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 community issues—the list goes on.

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. 

Roam’s job was to get rid of that pain. And it did—for a while. But now it’s back.

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The core idea that caught on with Roam is the concept of a bidirectional link. Previous note-taking systems allowed linking in only one direction: you could link from one note to another, but the note being linked to had no automatic link back to the original note.

Bi-directional linking, by contrast, creates a link from the first note to the second, and from the second to the first automatically. Roam made this extremely easy to accomplish—just by typing pieces of your notes in [[ brackets ]] you could link between notes, and even create new ones if the note you were linking to didn’t already exist.

The idea was to create a highly-networked system of notes with lots of links between them. By doing so, you could increase serendipitous encounters with old notes, and decrease your risk of losing a note, and generally get more out of the whole note-taking experience, or indeed life itself:

I believed that if I used it, I’d learn more from my experiences because I wouldn’t forget them. I’d take away more lessons from the books I’d read because I’d always have them close at hand. I’d make better decisions, produce better writing, and maybe my hair would even start to look as lustrous as Conor’s. 

(Side-by-side comparison. How am I doing on the hair part?)There’s a ton of intelligence and deep thought behind Roam’s design. But did it actually work for me?

Not really. If I plotted out the percent of my time writing bidirectional links vs. actually looking at my notes and clicking through the links in them, this is what I estimate it would look like:

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. 

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 genius of bi-directional linking is that when I first started to use it, the neurotic hamster in my head decided to turn down the volume knob on the ‘Where should I put this?’ question. 

Why? Bidirectional linking is a very good story. Roam’s job is to make me believe that if I just surround pieces of my notes like this [[ ]] I won’t really have to worry about finding the note again. It’s now networked! The need to take notes far outstripped the need to review them (see: graph above), so Roam solved my problem. 

After some time though, reality started to sink in. ‘I am not really going back through all of these notes as often as I thought I would.’ My next automatic assumption is that if they were just organized better I might go through them more. And so, the question starts to creep in again. ‘Where should I put this?’

Once I’m back to thinking this way, all sorts of other problems that I have with Roam start to creep in. ‘Where is the mobile app?’ And, ‘why doesn’t it feel like the product is improving? And, ‘why does everything feel like a mess?’ All of these problems were present, but none were important so long as I believed Roam was solving my core issue. But now that it’s not, suddenly, point-solution alternatives like Apple Notes and Things start to feel appealing. And the whole thing unravels.

I used to use Roam for lots of things: a daily diary, book notes, keeping track of lists like my todo list, and taking meeting notes.

Today, this is my stack:

• Daily Diary / paper notebook
• Book Notes / split between Roam and Muse
• To-do List / Things
• Meeting Notes / Apple Notes

The whole thing moved away from Roam because I started to worry again about where to put things.

This might seem trivial, or useless, or reductive. But it is actually quite valuable. If we're really using Roam to regulate the emotional experience of not knowing where to put a note, then that suggests a lot of product changes Roam could make to perform better at that job. 

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The easiest way for Roam to fix this would be to improve  the search function...

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