Why is HN obsessed with Zettelkasten? | Hacker News Reader

Why is HN obsessed with Zettelkasten?

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28 pointsrealYitzi19 comments

Hacker News really really likes all things related to personal note-taking. See also, emacs org-mode.

Personally, I find it pretty low quality intellectual content for this site.

Very few note taking apps, maybe zero, that are good, not electron, work on Linux, support darkmode, also work well if I need to jot something down on mobile. I find I'm almost always better off with the free tier of dropbox.

The best ones all work on Linux.

as opposed to being a marketing tool for YC

Which begs the question, what do you all consider to be high quality content for this site?

I realize it's the opposite of what this site is about, but the greatest enjoyment I've gotten from HN was always from discussions about non-technical, everyday life stuff where things get surprisingly deep. Two posts that stood out to me in recent memory were

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30161578, a discussion about the hardships of becoming a farmer. I especially liked dpatru's comment: "The natural state of man is poverty.[..]".

2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27038139, a discussion about the diamond industry. Linked is a comment thread about a guy buying a synthetic diamond for his wife and the ensuing trouble. There were numerous quality discussions about social interactions and psychological differences between the sexes. A salient meta comment by akarma: "[..]it's like you expect all women in your life to be like many people on HN — hyper-rational, utilitarian devs who would never want a mined diamond because a cheaper artificial one with better clarity exists[..]"

I always like the the non-work focused hacking posts about something interesting/surprising being achieved the most. For a famous example https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

1. Cool programming stuff, not involving politics or corporate politics flamewars. Generally narrowly focused on one task. (Make discussion more general and framework / language bikeshedding starts.)

2. Career related stuff. It can be useful. But sometimes it too feels like echo chamber.

I don't know, but I can guarantee it is written in Rust.

The first time I stumbled upon HN I then couldn't return for years - the idea of how much cool stuff (I necessarily want to learn) is on every page here would give me panic. I preferred to pretend I never seen this and kill the thought every time HN would pop up in my mind because I would have no time to sleep, eat, work or whatever otherwise. It took me some years and I learnt to manage with this obsession but it pretty much explains why would I need systematized notes - I obviously couldn't just remember everything.

I feel that ZK was as much a solution to a 'problem' as it was the manifestation of an individual's personality and mindset; and one that doesn't generalize well. Not to mention full ZK is incredibly inefficient for most people.

Sometimes 'doing things to become more productive' is an easier problem to solve than simply being more productive.

I wonder the same, having no idea what Zettelkasten is/are... it sounds like a solution for a problem I don't think I have.

There's not a ton of visible competition for interlinked-style note-taking. Zettelkasten has become a kind of big tent recognizable name for vaguely-wiki-like heavily-cross-referencing journalling/note taking.

I think of it as TV tropes-style note-taking

I've called TVTropes the great index of all human behavior before, so this seems somewhat like an honorific.

Everything is connected, so much behavior is cross-culturally human, and TVTropes in particular is a great uniter of plot, a collector of how wide & differently a common theme or plot can be created. It links together so many moving pictures, identifies underlying factors.

I haven't particular thought of Z as so all-encompassing, so unifying, before.

LOL, which is _why_ – after learning about plots and tropes last week here on HN – I had to _naturally_ create "Plotto for Obsidian"[^1]. (It's basically all of Plotto exploded into navigatable markdown files for faster discovery.)

[^1]: https://github.com/akaalias/plotto-for-obsidian

It gives us (me included) a sense of control of our mountain of todos, ideas, thoughts. In reality, the sense of control is imaginary. I have never really can control these things.

We just desperately want to organize the chaos in our lives.

In times when externals are uncertain people look for ways to keep their internals certain.

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