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Comment by aliasxneo | Hacker News Reader

I went down this rabbit hole for about six months last year. The hook is easy if you're working in IT (hint: it's in the name). The first two months were quite enlightening as I learned about Zettelkasten, PARA, Second Brain, Obsidian, Roam, LogSeq, etc. I even did a side journey into bullet journaling (it appears that craze is dying now).

Towards the end of my journey, I couldn't help but feel I was getting pulled into a cult. I would watch certain Youtube personalities famous in this area and realize they are talking in a language that doesn't make sense. To the uninitiated, it sounded fascinating, but the more I learned, the more I realized a majority of it was cyclical.

Perhaps this is an overly pessimistic view, but nowadays I just write stuff in a daily Logseq journal and move on. No organization, mind maps, second brains, thought galaxies, idea mitochondria, etc. Just a little bit of English spread across a few bullets.

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There are YouTube influencers for every niche interest. The pattern you describe can be found in people talking about diets, exercise, fashion, home remodeling, etc. Creating novel terms is one way for influencers to differentiate and increase their views and search rankings... but I agree that it makes things far more complex and inscrutable than they need to be.

The best way to start journaling is to write a little bit every day with whatever tool has the lowest friction for you.

Agree. Most of it is productivity porn, and indulgence in it happens at the expense of getting any real work done. The OG outliner community has a term related to it: CRIMP, which is the compulsive behavior of acquiring new software tools (and obsessing over the perfect organizational structures. )

Every hobby seems to have a version of this on the web. In electronic musician and producer circles it's GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) though I've seen it used in many other hobby communities as well. In video games, people have endless backlogs. I think it's just a consequence of the attention economy preying on our craving for instant gratification.

Yes. Add nothing, do nothing until forced to.

Obsidian still does this.

It's not an IDE, heck no. It's just notepad with some bells and whistles coders could use (but only when necessary.)

Yeah, folks show off online. Ignore those wankers.

ADD: Good grief, reading these comments. You folks aren't building a spaceship, you should be just taking notes and organizing them into something greater than the individual note. Every second you spend in CSS or trying to get a batch process to do your taxes or whatnot? You're doing it wrong. You're going the wrong way.

I don't find that "pessimistic" at all, though I don't think it's fair call the serious PKM crowd a cult. Different use cases and projects just have different requirements. The set up for someone like the author here who is doing historical research, will naturally require more organization, and thus naturally go through cycles of reorganization. I think this is similar to how engineering architectures sometimes cycle through idiomatic themes over the course of different refactors.

Though especially now with the potential of LLM-based retrieval I personally worry about keeping things well organized even less than it used to.

For clarity, I wasn't calling the PKM crowd a cult. My point is that after a certain level of engagement (i.e., consuming a ton of written and media-based information about the subject), I realized there was a certain cult-like following present. I'm unsure how much that following constitutes the overall PKM crowd, but I wouldn't say it's the entire crowd or even a large majority.

Like with many things, serious people tend to be a lot quieter (i.e., they are not running YouTube's content treadmill). So, the perception likely doesn't match the reality.

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