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While Roam has become something of a dumpster fire with its unprompted Reddit megaban, losing its whole dev team, etc, they do deserve partial credit for awaken

While Roam has become something of a dumpster fire with its unprompted Reddit megaban, losing its whole dev team, etc, they do deserve partial credit for awakening the world to the possibility that there is much out there worth exploring beyond Evernote and Notion. There are now so many promising tools (most based on backlinking, as Roam popularized) that we have a site https://noteapps.info https://noteapps.info dedicated to chronicling the differences in some 30 viable note apps that now exist. At least half of these note apps were created in the past three years alone. That said, Obsidian is in rareified air among the third gen note apps. The pace of evolution is right up there alongside Craft and Amplenote, where almost every week there is some interesting new wrinkle being added. I can’t wait to see how productive we will become in the next 10 years as these tools let us leverage our brains far beyond what has been historically possible.

bigdang 5y ago
They lost their whole dev team? Can you share a link?
- capableweb 5y ago
  Yeah, also doubting this as after searching around on the interwebs I cannot find anything to support this statement. Edit: found some sort of source from deleted content from Redddit - https://www.reveddit.com/v/RoamResearch/comments/pvj0o2/off_is_roam_doing_okay_as_a_company/ https://www.reveddit.com/v/RoamResearch/comments/pvj0o2/off_... Seems to be a misreading of a support reply, where they replied "this is a known issue that our engineer is aware of." and then the pitchforks come out. The founder of the company replied in the same thread too: > We're doing quite well. > Besides myself and Josh (the engineers who built Roam) - we've got 5 other engineers working on the team to varying degrees -- including the author of Datascript, which Roam and the majority of the Roam clones are built off. > Right now we earn enough each year to keep the company going for 2-3 years, and as a result we're able to invest in major open source projects that we (and all the Roam clones built in Clojure) will be able to build from for many years to come.
wetpaws 5y ago
>megaban I went to subreddit to check this and apparently it's a dozen trolls who like writing that founder is nazi. Ughm, ok.
- EleanorKonik 5y ago
  The Roam reddit team banned the guy who runs RoamStack [1] (who apparently hangs out on their Reddit answering questions a bunch?) for saying that a new policy announcement (that they later deleted) sounded concerning [2]. I believe they later rescinded the ban once they realized who he was. So I think it's slightly more complicated than that, unfortunately. (Note: I'm a moderator for Obsidian.md but I'm also in a couple of discords with Roam users, Logseq users, etc.) [1] https://twitter.com/rroudt/status/1446542563620622351 https://twitter.com/rroudt/status/1446542563620622351 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/q3q4uw/tyranny_kingship_and_the_stewardship_of_the_roam/hful19t/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/q3q4uw/tyrann...

bigdang 5y ago

They lost their whole dev team? Can you share a link?

capableweb 5y ago
Yeah, also doubting this as after searching around on the interwebs I cannot find anything to support this statement. Edit: found some sort of source from deleted content from Redddit - https://www.reveddit.com/v/RoamResearch/comments/pvj0o2/off_is_roam_doing_okay_as_a_company/ https://www.reveddit.com/v/RoamResearch/comments/pvj0o2/off_... Seems to be a misreading of a support reply, where they replied "this is a known issue that our engineer is aware of." and then the pitchforks come out. The founder of the company replied in the same thread too: > We're doing quite well. > Besides myself and Josh (the engineers who built Roam) - we've got 5 other engineers working on the team to varying degrees -- including the author of Datascript, which Roam and the majority of the Roam clones are built off. > Right now we earn enough each year to keep the company going for 2-3 years, and as a result we're able to invest in major open source projects that we (and all the Roam clones built in Clojure) will be able to build from for many years to come.

wetpaws 5y ago

>megaban I went to subreddit to check this and apparently it's a dozen trolls who like writing that founder is nazi. Ughm, ok.

EleanorKonik 5y ago
The Roam reddit team banned the guy who runs RoamStack [1] (who apparently hangs out on their Reddit answering questions a bunch?) for saying that a new policy announcement (that they later deleted) sounded concerning [2]. I believe they later rescinded the ban once they realized who he was. So I think it's slightly more complicated than that, unfortunately. (Note: I'm a moderator for Obsidian.md but I'm also in a couple of discords with Roam users, Logseq users, etc.) [1] https://twitter.com/rroudt/status/1446542563620622351 https://twitter.com/rroudt/status/1446542563620622351 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/q3q4uw/tyranny_kingship_and_the_stewardship_of_the_roam/hful19t/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/q3q4uw/tyrann...