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Comment by buttocks | Hacker News Reader

> The release of Roam was a Cambrian explosion in the previously moribund field of personal information management

What an astounding claim. I guess if I had even heard of Roam up to this point, it might be less astounding.

At least in my circles Roam has been absolutely impossible to miss even if living under a rock. Before Roam, people around me used either Evernote or OneNote or some kind of text files in directories scheme, all of which apparently sucks for other people just as much as they do for me.

Most are now on Roam or Obsidian, and I hear that at least in some in scientific circles Roam has made an even bigger splash. I've tried Roam and Obsidian and a few copycats and stuck with Roam, and it's lightyears ahead of what I had before, but there seems to be no good way to interface with the graph using code and that's limiting things severely for me. Still looking for something better, but IMO it's absolutely fair to say that Roam has had a huge impact.

If your circles were into onenote or evernote they were pretty tight to begin with. I use Apple notes app for everything. Going beyond a default OS notes app is a big step. I keep all my subscriptions in there. Monthly cash flows. Any interesting links I find. Though the links I almost never go back to

Roam (and Obsidian, Evernote, OneNote, ...) are aimed at people who work with large-ish amounts of facts and knowledge and sources and need to organize that somehow, I guess most people in such jobs will use something like that. Roam and Obsidian make it (relatively) easy to build a sort-of queryable graph structure, which I guess is a pretty niche thing to want. Apple Notes is great too, I use it for travel to do lists and the like, it's great for that. I don't keep my private everyday notes in Roam, that would be a bit overkill. They don't really solve the same problem, more like adjacent problems.

Curious what are your circles?

Have you been following the field of personal information management closely these last few years?

If you have so much personal information that you need specialized software to help you manage it, you have too much.

I think it’s probably the opposite — the data is obviously there — you encounter vast amounts of new information every day, though most of it useless, but there clearly remains a lot of useful information; you’re just not capturing it.

Seems an unjustified over generalisation or you’re taking the ‘personal’ in personal information too literally. I use obsidian to manage notes for my job, which is research and writing.

This will be hilarious to anyone that has had to write an academic thesis or a book.

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