He mentions several organizations that sponsored their development, but I don’t think VC would have anything to do with them because they are a “note taking app”. That’s what I recall from his interview or tweets.
So it looks like 2020 is going to be the year of COVID-19 and backlinks.
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I know they borrowed money from Tesla GTM, but they are VC-funded too. I distinctly remember a VC plumping up the company a couple of months ago, saying he got into Roam after a meeting and demo. A quick search found two two different listings for their seed round:
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Yeah, you’re right. I remember Chapter One now.
I think initially know one was interested, then the cult kicked in.
Hearing about VC funding made me curious about their privacy policy and terms of conditions. It’s interesting bc it seems like they have two definitions of data: 1) data as notes and 2) data as use. The former seems protected (for now), but the latter not so much. It’s the latter that’s actually valuable to VCs. I’m pretty sure they could care less about backlinked bibles.
These things are so tricky to parse, though, is that what others are reading as well? Where’s a lawyer when we need one? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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Seems pretty straightforward. They promise not to look at your data or let anyone else look at it (sans warrant).
But you, mon frère, you and your (allegedly) de-identified info (which analyses have shown isn’t quite so anonymous) is up for grabs: your IP address (which can be cross-referenced with data from elsewhere to identify you), when you log in, the hardware you’re using, credit card type, and metadata about how/much you’re using the service.
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Yep, that was my take, too. 
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I think that, for these people, zettelkasten is just the new GTD or Deep Work or 7 Habits and Roam (or Obsidian or TiddlyWiki or whatever) is the new cool tool that’s going to make the magic happen.
I think the Roam guys need to think about how they’re going to deal with the backlash, when it happens:.
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Maybe, but we are also pretty darn good at blaming ourselves.
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I think it goes deeper than that. In this culture that values transaction over interaction, Zettelkasten (and similar systems) offers a path for deeper reflection. Perhaps in reflects an understanding that more is not better as we reach the limits of sustainability and that simply more is not better, perhaps understanding deeper (connecting ideas rather than collecting them) offers a more fulfilling path.
Of course, I also like playing with new and shiny toys too… in case enlightenment lies around the corner. Falling into the rabbit hole of playing with the tools rather than doing the work…
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I’m a few days late, but did someone summon a privacy attorney??
Seems pretty good to me, actually, in the scheme of modern privacy policies. Keep in mind that data about use is valuable to VCs (if we assume that is true–I personally do not know) because it’s a proxy for potential recurring revenue. It’s also REALLY hard to parse privacy policies for when data is used to actually improve the service and when it is used for other things. So in Roam’s defense, they are pretty clear about not using your data for marketing to you…
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I did that. I like it 
I really like this. It unifies the “note labyrinth” management with a very good daily planner. In fact, if it wasn’t for the following things, I would be paying the $500 for the extra culty plan.
Negatives:
- No good native apps for phones. Native app for mac would also be a benefit, but I made a Unite webview app which works perfectly fine.
- Vendor lock-in. No way to export the bindings between the notes when you export them.
- No way to know if company will exist in five years.
Most of these negatives will go away with time, though… I might end up paying monthly.
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I haven’t played with this too much but I believe they just export as Markdown wiki-style links. You can export the whole database as JSON or markdown. Some of the competitors (Amplenote, Obsidian) export the database just fine. I wonder if you just exported the files the links would work in, say, iAWriter.
Obsidian does a decent job of importing markdown from Roam, and has options for converting tags to links, and the like.
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Markdown export in Bear or 1Writer would basically work just fine at the note level. Exporting in JSON maintains block level elements, but requires some coding to get all the connects to be replicated elsewhere (it has been done with JavaScript already). The only thing that doesn’t export is diagrams. Kanban and Tables would need to be reconstructed, but it’s possible.
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New open-source alternative in VS Code shared on Producthunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/foam
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VSC has lots of interesting plugins that scratch the Roam itch (and the Obsidian itch). Really good editor.
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I wonder how robust Roam is. Today Ulysses started crashing on my Mac when I selected text, turned out I’d been editing a single 38,000+ word, book-length sheet I’d been using for research. (I subsequently broke the file into six sheets and now everything’s fine, though more annoying to search.)
I have a half-dozen individual sheets that large, and I’m wary of any new product that can handle files this big, especially with the overhead of their unique added links/dependencies.
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I’ve seen at least one post on the Roam Slack reporting that Roam became unusably slow handling a very large text. That was some weeks ago, before they’d uprated their infrastructure, so it may be OK now.