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Comment by noud | Hacker News Reader

I've seen several posts about Zettelkasten lately. What is it with this whole Zettelkast way of taking notes? How did Zettelkast become so popular out of the sudden?

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The book "How to Take Smart Notes" and YouTube productivity gurus, most likely. I like the method, it's a natural way to structure your notes and spend more time actually writing them than categorizing.

It's a fad, just like bullet journaling was a few years ago.

I'm certain that (again, like bullet journaling) underneath the hype is a decent productivity system, but you have to wade through hordes of breathless fans eager for you to click that subscribe button, etc.

it definitely is a fad but of all the fads the backlink based 'unstructured' way to take notes is honestly a very smart idea. It's the first time I've actually stuck with note-taking because it sort of organizes itself which for me was always the biggest problem with notes.

To me, having to manually make links between notes doesn't seem unstructured, nor does it seem self-organizing. What if it doesn't occur to me to make a link in A pointing to B? Then if I'm reading B and looking at its backlinks, how will I know it's related to A?

I can't speak for every implementation, but in the one I use (logseq) if you say back-link 'Podcasts' in 'Audiodrama' then in 'Audiodrama' 'Podcasts' will show up as a 'linked reference' like so (https://imgur.com/5FADCI5), as well as a bi-directional connection in the graph you can get of all your links.

Over time this produces something like this (https://imgur.com/6I9ojRG), which is what I meant by self-organizing. Just with back-links without having to create any hierarchies (what i meant by unstructured) you get a data-structure that is actually still pretty insightful.

Zettelkasten is just one incarnation of the hypertext idea. Wikis and the web being others. Calling it "Zettelkasten" is perhaps a fad, but the thing itself will never go out of fashion because it mirrors our thinking in a fundamental way.

It's not a fad. The methodology has existed since the 14th century. It's just like with Meditation - those who firmly believe that meditation doesn't work usually are those who never practice it. The difference here - Zettelkasten doesn't require years and years of practice to reap the benefits.

And to answer the previous commenter,

> How did Zettelkast become so popular out of the sudden?

It has not become popular out of a sudden. Different applications for the slip-box method for taking notes existed long before. Roamresearch has popularized it relatively recently. I guess maybe they've done something right; I don't know, I never used Roamresearch myself.

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