Reading the replies to this tweet reminds me of how truly revolutionary products get marginalized with incorrect positioning and bad feature comparisons, and feel the push towards having the wrong focus. 1/17 https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1254068056998862848?s=20

I am not a fanboy, though I use @RoamResearch daily now. I have no affiliation whatsoever with @Conaw, and I will try to make my point as dispassionately as possible. 2/17

I will also try to stay away from specific features of Roam that I consider as pathbreaking. This thread is not about Roam's features, but about people focusing on the wrong thing when they see Roam. 3/17

Many replies suggest that there is a cult around @RoamResearch without a real foundation.

Cults don't work that way. 4/17

If you visit Roam's slack channel, it's full of people helping people. And they do everything from making Roam more presentable to creating tutorials to reporting bugs to inventing hacks.

@Conaw is rarely involved. 5/17

If they had no incentive to continue using Roam, or they thought this was not a sustainable enterprise, these people wouldn't devote their energy and time to this tool. 6/17

Most people compare Roam to Wikis, and that's correct. To an extent. 7/17

The real difference is in the gentle nudge that @RoamResearch gives towards better note-taking techniques, writing methods, and mirroring our brain in terms of interconnected thoughts. 8/17

These are not visible when you first open Roam's UI. Technical aspects - zettelkasten, knowledge maps, spaced repetition, the smart notes paradigm - are embedded in there, but not visible easily. 9/17

These approaches do not apply to everybody. Trying to introduce these concepts upfront will also reduce comprehension and tool usage. 10/17

So hiding them in plain sight, while allowing most people to become productive, is a good thing. 11/17

There are also comments about no APIs, no porting of data from other note-taking tools, lousy UI, mobile apps.

All those are the wrong things to focus on for Roam right now. 12/17

These are solved problems. Getting from zero to 100 on any of these items is a fairly straightforward, well-understood path. 13/17

Roam cannot afford to focus on these because the primary value of the tool, of building a sustainable personalized knowledge map, will be compromised. 14/17

TLDR - Most of what Roam is doing makes sense, only when you consider its end goals and current position in its trajectory.

It is not a polished tool, and it is not meant to be at this point. 15/17

It's true that this fact is not easily visible to visitors dropping by to check out Roam. But IMHO, that is not the fault of the founders, nor should it be their focus. 16/17

These opinions are my own and are based on my satisfaction with using Roam after using many other note-taking apps for years. 17/17