When other people are telling your story it’s natural to get protective about it. You have to fight criticism harder because you’re not in control of the narrative.
And I think a lot of the negative comments would go away if they understood more about Roam’s features and vision.
Conversation
Moving documentation for new users out of a Roam graph and on onto the website would help very much.
I think this is all just natural part of a natural trajectory for a company that had so much buzz and growth early on.
“What got us here won’t get us there” takes time to see
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Early success means that marketing wasn’t needed. A passionate community emerged and didn’t require the type of proactive fostering and maintenance you’re talking about.
Some have said Obsidian does more to foster community - of course they’d have to, they are up against Roam
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You’ve got to try harder on community, marketing etc. if you’re behind. While Roam was getting free publicity and good will Obsidian had to figure out ways to generate more of it
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Aside from being a great tool, I think a significant part of Roam’s early success was because it took effort to learn how to use it. People invested a lot of time and energy into it which made them have stronger feelings about it (see Ikea effect)
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But these strong feelings of excitement and love can turn into frustration and anger if people feel like they’re being unfairly treated or not listened too.
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Communication style and personality also attracted people to Roam. But this can be flipped around too over time.
Visionary, quirky, fun, obsessive, geeky, rebellious… can be seen as flippant, arrogant, disorganised etc.
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But communication style and personality hasn’t changed - that’s actually the problem.
It’s still quirky and nerdy and exciting. But people’s perception of this communication style has changed. Or they grew more and more dislike for it over time (you can’t please everyone)
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This was called out by months ago. I immediately thought of this tweet when I read Curzi’s post.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @Conaw @gerad_t0d and 3 others
I'm suggesting you take a hard look at the consequences of the apparently cosmetic choice to use such language and mental models. Who does it attract? Who does it turn off. What doors open? What doors close?
In case it's not clear, it personally turns me off quite strongly.
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Building a business and product is the art of juggling priorities & resources. Hard stuff.
It seems an over reaction to for people to say things like “the fall of Roam” when, in fact, this is the type of learning experience that will make a company stronger long-term
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Good stuff for and gang to reflect on. I’ve not really laid attention to all this, but still been using as before. My key product concerns (loading time, permissions, API, link preview) are unchanged from a year ago. That’s basically all I care about.
I’m not in it for community or messianic world-changing, and I think people who are actually interested in the core technology basically are disjoint from those for whom it’s a missionary vehicle. The company has to basically figure out which group to serve or lose both.
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lesswrong.com/posts/Js34Ez9n
What matters:
A) Building a great team and a culture of learning and truth seeking
B) Ship great product that solves problems users care about
Plenty mistakes this year, fortunately we’ve built a great tool, healthy business, most users don’t care how
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