Roam Research is NOT a model. It's a money machine.

[TiddlyTweeter]

See my Tweets ...

@RoamResearch way OVERRATED. The concepts it advances are NOT new. It is basically leveraging a loss of memory for profit. https://twitter.com/BeaBonobo/status/1305918780145635328

Thought is as thought does. Technology interacts with it.

That reflexive process is enabling (or crippling in bad tech). 

#TiddlyWiki basic is AGNOSTIC on HOW humans use it to make meanings.

That is a great quality. MOST other non-linear systems are OVER-commited on.

 https://twitter.com/BeaBonobo/status/1305917906316910592

Best wishes

TT 

[Birthe C]

TT,

That might be, but RoamResearch has send a lot of new users to tiddlywiki. We have often discussed how to get new users, we should  be thankful for that good effect.

You have been so quiet lately, that I was starting to worry.

Birthe

[TW Tones]

TT,

I love that

A Girl Called "Cat"

@BeaBonobo

·

6h

@RoamResearch

way OVERRATED. The concepts it advances are NOT new. It is basically leveraging a loss of memory for profit.

Yes this occurs all over the place , I remember Edward De Bono getting/claiming credit for ideas from Systems theory 20-50 years earlier.

In two weeks I am doing a short talk with my Philosophy group in the loss of memory, not personal but cultural, historical and corporate knowledge. This is a wonderful example to include thanks

Tones

[TiddlyTweeter]

Tones

Philosophy is very good in this situation.

LINKAGE & TAGGING on the net generally is (1) seriously under-conceived; and (2) badly explained (because the language we are using LACKS needed differentiations). Philosophy (the art of deriving new working concepts) helps.

TT

[TiddlyTweeter]

Birthe

Right. Roam got us users. So thanks. Though slightly qualified.

More interesting, I think, is the issue of  HOW Roam got known?

Was that marketing? Or serendipity? Dimmi (tell me).

We COULD promote TW more I think. We don't do much. 

A brilliant system for insiders is never knowable without some activating of public facing.,

Its NOT as easy as it may at first sound.

But, any ideas?

Best wishes

TT

[Birthe C]

TT,

Well, It was rather difficult not to hear or read about RoamResearch everywhere, that is also the case now, just not as positive, many finding alternatives. That might have to do with pricing but not only.

https://yetidistro.com/roam/ I know that is rather old now, but still somebody earned nicely writing how to use RoamResearch.

Especially the paragraph, it being so hard to use,, that once people learn how to use it, they keep talking about it and writing about it...collecting material about it.

At least that part we do too, don't you think?

I think people have difficulty envisioning, what Tiddlywiki can be used for. Editions might be some of the answer, but not only. To me it seems that everyone might like one edition, if only it was special tailored for that one person.  We have often been told that people do not have time for that. As far as I know no one has unlimited time.

New users often ask for documentation or is this added to the manual? That after endless threads often repeated about documentation. Not that simple.

Birthe

[David Gifford]

I guess you will all need to blame me. I was the one who used Roam as a model first, and got this ball rolling. TiddlyBlink/Stroll was just an experiment to see how much of Roam I could replicate in TW. Saq was a big help there. When I saw it worked pretty good I promoted it on Twitter by adding Roam's Twitter tag. Then Anne-Laure got hold of it and it took off. And when Roam got rid of the free beta, there was another wave of interest of people looking for free alternatives, and a couple videos on Youtube helped.

I am kind of letting Stroll die a slow death because to me it was just an experiment, and I feel like the experiment succeeded; I don't have time to add new features and keep its momentum growing; and there are other good options now like Drift and TiddlyResearch. The existence of those options, and the continued positive feedback I get on Stroll, tells me I was onto something.

Back to Roam: it is an ingenious combination of concepts: outliner, granular backlinking, mindmap, autocompletion, automatic page generation, automatic journal entry for the day, side-by-side pages, a bunch of easy to use "macros" and filters. And they have only begun. Users are now creating CSS themes. I played with that and enjoyed it. There has been a lot of thought behind this, marketed it intelligently, and they know where they want to go with it. They deserve the praise, and the money, they get.

Just because the Roam creators are making money and getting investors, and we are open source and are less known, doesn't mean they are doing anything wrong. Just because some of their features have been around for years, many of them in TiddlyWiki, doesn't make their unique integration of those features any less amazing. Every day I read new tweets of people hooked on Roam. TT's post feels like it came out of envy rather than from an attempt to say something constructive.

If there is any envy or sadness on my part, it's that TiddlyWiki really could have had that number of users, even a few years ago, had there been a sustained interest in onboarding and documentation rather than just random spurts. I might have been willing to take more stabs at that, (I *did* do some non-techy documentation in 2014 that is still there in tw.com), but to me the complicated problem of saving made me give up the idea of promoting TW to the general public. I knew most non-techy potential users would be turned off by something for which the first step would be to figure out which of 40 options for saving they should use. Timimi seems like a good game changer, it works great, but even Timimi requires several steps to install. Thanks to Timimi, though, I am thinking again about doing some introductory Youtube tutorials in Spanish for TiddlyWiki.

As for me and Roam, I went in a week or two ago to try it out, to see if I really ought to commit to it, mainly because of the value of granular line-by-line backlinks, but utimately decided to stick with TiddlyWiki and Dynalist. I use Dynalist for when I need to generate and organize thoughts really quickly. I use TiddlyWiki for everything else. For my purposes, that is enough.

And you can bet something will come along in a year or two that will wow people even more than Roam. What Roam did to Notion, something else will do to Roam.

Anyway, a number of disconnected thoughts to offer a balance to TT's original post. No less love for him, though. Blessings.

[Birthe C]

David,

LOL, blame you, why? Stroll is great and a lot of new users learned about the existence of Tiddlywiki. Some got inspired and created variants and I would not be surprised if a lot of us are using some of your goodies too in other wikis. (I know I am).

You have had lots of work following up on all the questions and creating collections for Goodies, very well done. The tutorial part of Stroll we can all learn from.

The important thing is, that there is something for everyone and that also goes for money or no money. Most people need to take notes.

Birthe

[David Gifford]

Thanks strikke, my comment about blaming me for the recent emphasis on Roam in the TiddlyWiki community was tongue in cheek, since TiddlyTweeter's post title was that Roam is a negative influence - NOT a model, overrated, and just out for the money.

[Rika Sukenik]

Hi all. 

If I may, I'd like to chime in. I'm a new Tiddlywiki user and I've also been a Roam user for several months. Both are wonderful products. I think - at least for right now - there is space for both tools in the knowledge management ecosystem. I think it would be helpful if I provide my personal experience using Roam & Tiddlywiki, in the hopes of shedding light on each product's strengths and weaknesses and how to potentially think about forging a path ahead. 

Let me start by explaining how I roamed onto Roam. I was doing some serendipitous Internet searching on neuroscience. I don't remember the details of what I was searching fo,  but I stumbled on Anne-Laure's blog, so I must have had used some keywords associated with motivation or productivity. Through Anne-Laure's writing, I discovered Roam (I also discovered TiddlyWiki through Anne-Laure's article(s)). I was intrigued. I fell down the rabbit hole of seemingly endless Roam tutorials and content. It was overwhelming, but super exciting because Roam exposed me to new ideas that I had not heard of before. I know some folks have made the claim that these ideas are not new - I agree; but, they were new to me. Roam's content was my gateway to these ideas. Switching gears to my experience using Roam, in short, it's pretty clunky. It's not a beautiful and seamless user experience like Notion or Evernote. In fact, there's not even a mobile app. It requires some coding knowledge to understand how to use it. Again, it's clunky. I'm not happy about paying the subscription fee, but I'm biting the bullet because the community brings me value. I've learned a lot. 

Enter Tiddlywiki. I was pumped when I discovered it through Anne-Laure because it seemed like I could use it to create a digital garden that resembles Andy Matuschak's Notes. Transcluding pop-ups is super cool, and Roam doesn't have that feature. I found it quite simple to implement in Tidlywiki once I got the hang of things. For me, personally, the learning curve to use Tiddlywiki was much higher than Roam. For example, I didn't need to learn how to host a website with Roam so I could save my work. As far as using Tiddlywiki, an empty Tiddler looks like just like a blog post. Tiddlywiki seems like a really nifty way to host your own blog.  With a vibrant open-source community, a person could figure out how to modify the styling and turn it into a really cool personal homepage. You can't do the same with Roam. I'm not going to share my Roam database with the public. It would be like sharing my Google Drive journals. Valuable content, but it lacks the look & feel of a blog. 

I hope to have expressed that I think Tiddlywiki & Roam have their own unique space in the knowledge management ecosystem.  One key point is that Roam, unlike Tiddlywiki, is a for-profit company that has already found monetization. They also now have investors to appease. Who knows what direction this may take them in. Roam's future is far from certain. Some questions that come to mind are, 1) will they be able to continue attracting new users? maybe, but they probably need to make Roam more user friendly; 2) will they continue to engage their current users? maybe, but they'll need to push out exciting new features to justify the subscription cost. Tiddlywiki's strength lies in its open source nature. When I think of Tiddlywiki, I think of platforms like Roku & Android that enable any dev to build on them and as a result these platforms have lots of apps and lots of users. The potential is there for both apps, and there is plenty of potential market share to go around. Most people don't use Roam or Evernote or TiddlyWiki, but most people are overwhelmed with information and would get a lot of benefit from using a knowledge management product that is useful, innovative, and easy to use. ✌️

[TW Tones]

Rika

Thanks for sharing your view here. I think you touch on something Important, the revolution who's time has come, is the democratisation of Information Technology. Giving the users the ability to craft their own environment at a minimum to store and retrieve there own content, for personal or public consumption.  Few people write code and can craft their own solutions. Commercial products refine this and present MVP Minimum viable products that evolve quickly, however while users may impact the evolution somewhat, you buy into their model and priorities. This is an aspect of cloud apps not too many have realised yet, they are shiny, attractive and easy to use, in part because the are focused or dumbed down somewhat. This is good for many people at least initially, but one does become dependant of the provider, so a key requirement must be you can export your data without loosing too much information.

Personally for me however I have the advantage of a career in IT and more recently Knowledge and Information management, so to me tiddlywiki is a platform that evolves and I can evolve myself even if the community stopped. I can own and host it myself, use it offline, duplicate, spawn, interrelate etc... You could say I have embraced the democratisation of software and the commercial products do not have much to offer me any more, except perhaps hosting and sharing content on the internet in a multi-user/access form. A gap I continue to work on (as others do).

"Horses for courses", it all depends on our personal journey.

Regards

Tones

[TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Rika

Very good, full, detailed response that illustrates the issues well. Such detail is good.

A chain of influence you lay out very well (Anne-Laure :: Roam, for example). This is a great illustration of how users read & respond to encountered information.

My point, in the OP, was two things (a) Roam isn't  particularly innovative; BUT (b) its can look innovative BECAUSE the net is basically a mess on "concepts" of what it is doing. It is all over the shop.

I think TW, being AGNOSTIC on linking/tagging, could help heal that mess but showing MANY apps that work in different ways for different aims using variant "link strategies". But WE are NOT good yet at promoting PACKAGED  SOLUTIONS.

I think accounts like yours are essential to understand real user needs & address them

Best wishes

TT

[TiddlyTweeter]

Birthe C wrote:

I think people have difficulty envisioning, what Tiddlywiki can be used for. Editions might be some of the answer, but not only. To me it seems that everyone might like one edition, if only it was special tailored for that one person.  

Interesting post. One that COULD be answered practically, I think. For example ... 

Q: Is there such a thing as an appropriate TW application for mathematicians? 

A: YES. There is starting application for mathematicians that includes formula & maths notation via laTEX; good dynamic calculation is inbuilt but can also be extended.

The point is this: Are there DISCRETE enough markets like "mathematicians"? IF SO it would be easy enough to address them by FIELD.

Best wishes

TT

 

[TiddlyTweeter]

David Gifford wrote:

I guess you will all need to blame me. 

Nah. It was good & opened a lot of useful directions for TW.

Power to your elbow & its active greasing.

MY point in the OP is that (a) the concepts Roam advances are NOT new; (b) that its approach plays on concepts of linkage that are (i) well worn; (ii) packaged to look innovative; (c) TW can DO all of them and more, no problem (which your Strolling showed). It is not a big deal. I care less they make money from that than consume informational space.

IMO the underlying issue is that, generally, on web, there is a very poor depiction/explanation of link/tag strategies, Despite their ubiquity & necessity. And that marketing of some non-linear solutions exploits that fact.

Better concepts are needed. And LEAFED (i.e. the process of grown differentiation from interacting primitives to redolent outcomes) examples in TW would aid that AND help promote TW.

Best wishes

TT

[Ed Heil]

I ran across a thread on Twitter a little while back which pointed out that Roam's popularity first exploded among the so-called "Rationalist" community on the internet (associated with the websites LessWrong and SlateStarCodex).

https://twitter.com/melissamcewen/status/1277465062010163200

[TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Ed

HA! Most interesting!

I followed that through to this: https://first1000.substack.com/p/roam-research

It is revealing on the HOW of attention to Roam, but also, implicitly, the motivation to wrest some "control" by it for it.

Many thanks

TT

[Charlie Veniot]

G'day,

We could say that every single TiddlyWiki instance out there is an Edition of TiddlyWiki.

I think a directory of editions would be cool, but even better (to me): a directory of TiddlyWiki instances/examples/purposes out there in the wild (available for all to study/copy.)

That would be pretty cool.  I can't help but think that every TiddlyWiki instance out there is a TiddlyWiki use case marketing gem.

[Atronoush]

Rika,

 Many thanks for your post and sharing your valuable experiences with TW and RR.

On Friday, September 18, 2020 at 3:40:59 AM UTC+4:30 rika.s...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi all. 

If I may, I'd like to chime in. I'm a new Tiddlywiki user and I've also been a Roam user for several months. Both are wonderful products. I think - at least for right now - there is space for both tools in the knowledge management ecosystem. I think it would be helpful if I provide my personal experience using Roam & Tiddlywiki, in the hopes of shedding light on each product's strengths and weaknesses and how to potentially think about forging a path ahead. 

Let me start by explaining how I roamed onto Roam. I was doing some serendipitous Internet searching on neuroscience. I don't remember the details of what I was searching fo,  but I stumbled on Anne-Laure's blog, so I must have had used some keywords associated with motivation or productivity. Through Anne-Laure's writing, I discovered Roam (I also discovered TiddlyWiki through Anne-Laure's article(s)).

In my opinion, Tiddlywiki has not enough advertising. Many people come to TW have seen videos in YouTube, some have read blogs. Unfortunately in most cases TW has not been introduced in full power and feature. For example their simple procedure to create static website and blog than what Anne-Laure described.

 

I was intrigued. I fell down the rabbit hole of seemingly endless Roam tutorials and content. It was overwhelming, but super exciting because Roam exposed me to new ideas that I had not heard of before. I know some folks have made the claim that these ideas are not new - I agree; but, they were new to me. Roam's content was my gateway to these ideas. Switching gears to my experience using Roam, in short, it's pretty clunky. It's not a beautiful and seamless user experience like Notion or Evernote. In fact, there's not even a mobile app. It requires some coding knowledge to understand how to use it. Again, it's clunky. I'm not happy about paying the subscription fee, but I'm biting the bullet because the community brings me value. I've learned a lot. 

Enter Tiddlywiki. I was pumped when I discovered it through Anne-Laure because it seemed like I could use it to create a digital garden that resembles Andy Matuschak's Notes. Transcluding pop-ups is super cool, and Roam doesn't have that feature. I found it quite simple to implement in Tidlywiki once I got the hang of things. For me, personally, the learning curve to use Tiddlywiki was much higher than Roam. For example, I didn't need to learn how to host a website with Roam so I could save my work. As far as using Tiddlywiki, an empty Tiddler looks like just like a blog post. Tiddlywiki seems like a really nifty way to host your own blog.  With a vibrant open-source community, a person could figure out how to modify the styling and turn it into a really cool personal homepage. You can't do the same with Roam. I'm not going to share my Roam database with the public. It would be like sharing my Google Drive journals. Valuable content, but it lacks the look & feel of a blog. 

I think TW is like development environment like a framework and creating a blog is like making a tool/product using Tiddlywiki. I can compare learning TW is like learning a very high level programming language. It lets you to develop simple apps in Html5+CSS3+JS with the speed of light :-) -:)

So, no worry to cast look and feel of your app created by TW using CSS and JS to anything you like! I know the problem is here most end users are NOT web developer NOT have information on using css+js so it likes you get the raw materials but you are looking for end product!!