What I see as working better is linear plus varying width, so you can read the same but deeper, make each step of the journey simpler or more complex depending on how much you want to invest. (i.e. post X has 3 progressively more complex variants)
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Yes… but maybe making an explicit conceptual dependency graph (“you can only read this web page if you already understand X, Y, and Z; follow the links for those if you don’t”) is worth a try.
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Oh, cool, thank you!
Is there any sort of community consensus on how well this worked out?
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Badly! But idk why exactly, the view was that it failed relative to its goals but idk what the goals exactly were
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They had a very interesting postmortem, as it happens:
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Amusingly, I disagree with the founder! He clashed w Eliezer, who wanted to focus on specific content, do special-case stuff, perfect that. Alexei thinks they should have focused on getting more authors. Premature in my view: prove in the high-effort case, then generalize.
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It’s sad: in the end, we’re left with no clear insight about what the best-case problems were with that core idea of surfacing and navigating dependency chains.
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I’m reading it now… thank you, extremely interesting, and discouraging.
Given your bearishness on the whole space, I’m wondering why you have built, and are actively using, one yourself?
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My goals are very different. My writing system is about helping me think, not about creating a legible communications artifact. The challenges are quite different across the two domains! The classic hypertext problems aren’t so limiting in a writing-focused context.
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I put my notes online almost as an afterthought. I’m frankly quite surprised that many people seem to enjoy reading them! I hate navigating that kind of atomized hypertext someone else has written. e.g. I haven’t yet come across a public Roam I enjoy reading.
Do you think it will ever be the case? The personal notes medium seems to rely to some extent on you knowing more or less what notes there are+importantly why those specific notes and not others, it's extremely tailored to yourself for max effectiveness.
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For example, imagine if you had to explain things you consider very basic, or forced to write about topics you consider irrelevant to your own personal projects, even if very interesting for others...
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Thanks for that, Ryan. There *are* other public working note archives I enjoy. For instance, John Carmack’s .plan files! Even some personal wikis. My hunch is that outliner-oriented writing encourages more atomization by default—hence less coherently-legible-to-others by default.
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There's something to this.. Roam felt more useful to me as a scratchpad or thinking space than a publishing space. It produced stuff that eventually went into Twitter, technical documentation, emails, system diagrams, code. But for some reason, I tended not to use Roam there
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Like a whiteboard!