I agree. It’s a beta product with some very interesting ideas, but the pricing seems wrong, the demand by free users has swamped their server and caused problems, we don’t know how well-prepared the devs are to handle the service going forward, there’s not good info on data security procedures, the company encourages users calling themselves part of a ‘cult,’ and the head dev/CEO apparently thinks it’s a good idea to troll people on Twitter.
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Totally agree. I think the word we might looking for here is “hubris”…
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Well, regardless of the PR issues (agreed), on the subject of reliability. There have only been two instances where data loss/load times were seriously inconvenient (been using since December). One week in Feb and last week - both coincided (not a coincidence) with two major productivity YouTubers posting videos - both resulted in over 10,000 new users in a weekend. However, I never had any major problems throughout this period.
Also, I feel as though Roam virtue and value proposition is a little undersold. Backlinks are foundational, yes. But what is just as import, if not more is the sum of its parts. The founder has always expressed this analogy, that he hopes to build an excel for text. I see this as extremely valuable. Yet backlinks are only one piece. It’s block architecture (like Notion) and varieties of transclusion make the bidirectional links far more powerful than a two way navigable street between notes. I can do this easily in Bear with a Siri shortcut. It’s the combination links, blocks, and transclusion that make this a powerful tool. The atomic unit of the app is not a page, but a block. These can be remixed, queried, aggregated, and edited in so many ways it’s absurd. I as a historian, essentially an aggregator of human knowledge through time, find these tools to be FAR more helpful than any other app. Dynalist, Notion, and perhaps tiddlywiki are the only comparable products - but none have the feature set.
And while many features are not finished, all are functional. Few mention the graph view (page and database), inline queries, transclusion, Kam am, diagram, pdf, iframe, Task Management, or the many other features built on this foundational trifecta.
The price, not happy. But I understand. Dynalist is 8$/Mo…what is Evernote these days, not to mention things like Tinderbox (though one-time). The founder has stressed for months he believes in the Tesla approach (questionable), basically only wanting niche users who “see” the value (or posturing). Though he has also stressed that pricing will not happen until stable, BUT that dev will continue rapidly towards the longer term goals.
Should be interesting to see. Hell, if all else fails, export and start somewhere else.
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In addition to your list, there are a couple of beautifully produced videos now by Drew Coffman on YouTube eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4AD320OG60
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Interesting to watch the vultures circling this week as RoamResearch had to shut out new subscribers. Amplenote is another app hoping to feed on the carnage. Given the bad rap Conor WS has had over his ‘arrogance’ in this forum and elsewhere, this guy is pretty snarky…
For now I am hanging in there with Roam. Haven’t seen anything else close as yet, though I am sure it will be cloned in due course. I received an invite for Obsidian but don’t have the time/skills/interest to go through the process of constructing it from it’s constituent parts. Bit too alpha for me.
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For me, obsidian doesn’t do block structure (yet) so not for me. But other than that it has huge promise.
And frankly, who really cares about the founders personality anyway, as long as the business is sound. You know the famous example I am speaking about MPU.
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This is what worries me.
The personality of the founder is one thing, yes, but the way the business does PR and strategy derives directly from that. When I see such posturing I wonder where that energy might better be invested. You never saw such posturing from Apple, Google, Netflix. They just keep their heads down and deliver great products. Microsoft does it as well today, and when they did posture – the infamous Ballmer era – they missed the mobile train… Of course, all business cases are different. But the idea of a “Roam cult” makes me run away screaming. I know I would absolutely get value out of Roam, but I will be waiting for the prettier, sounder, saner alternatives.
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I encourage you to try again. There’s nothing to “[construct] from its constituent parts”. Open the .dmg and move to Applications, like anything else. Pick a folder to be the top folder (“vault” in Obsidian-speak), then turn on whatever plugins float your boat. It’s a one-minute task and you’re done.
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Indeed, let’s give a pass to a dev of a niche beta app who no track record except for some clever coding, puerile behavior, and poor decisionmaking that knocked down his server and made him have to rush to close off the service to new users. (Oh, and once managing HuffPost Labs, the “Exclusive Community for Hackers Innovation”) Why not? After all if Musk and Jobs were a-holes anyone else in business who comes after ought to have license to be free of judgment on their behavior. Indeed, all deadbeat dads should get a pass too because Jobs was one for years. Just a modest proposal.
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complexity
It seems like it is a complex system, not complicated, but complex. Components with well-defined behavior are combined and result in emergent properties - the “surprise” and “delight” when using the system. This seems to be a property of Luhmann’s zettelkasten too.
pricing
And just a note for people balking at the price and saying, “I’m not paying $15/mo for that!” Well of course not, $15/mo will be for the system that is in place when they begin charging for it.
longevity
To each their own, of course, but I have derived a lot of value from using Roam as-is, and will take that knowledge with me from now on. I think not trying it for some speculative future crash is really cutting your nose off to spite your face.
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Nice burn. Point taken. Only time will tell.
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Can’t tell you how happy I was to read that sentence - the only correct use of the word emergent I have seen for ages. As a doc I despair of it being used in the medical field to mean ‘emergency’ - it started in the US (not China) but now appears to be pandemic…
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I would say the same. Very easy to set up.
It still has some rough edges, but I found it very interesting.
Not only the app is already very good and can be still much better, but the values and principles of the company/software are in the right direction (unlike R.{3}).
YARC
(Yet Another Roam Copier)
[Maybe one day we can say Copy, but not yet.]
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Damn, these clones look even more beta (… betaer?) than Roam itself. The note-taking landscape is sure to be very interesting 2-3 years from now though.
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So easy a child can use it. (Nice video on using tables.)
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How’s your experiment going? I’ve been building tiddlywiki static site for a little “digital garden” and having lots of fun with it: http://nurselog.online
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Well, I expected something completely different based on the name but I very much enjoyed browsing through the site. The page on digital gardens was very interesting. Thanks a lot.
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