# roam research: coverage

> what the discourse made of roam — the articles that traveled, the backlash, and the decline narrative.

## coverage

- 2019-11-04 — [roam: tool for thinking](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21440289) (hacker news) — positive. the earliest sizable hacker news discussion of the beta — mostly curiosity about what a 'tool for networked thought' even is. traction: 123 points, ~80 comments — the discovery thread.
- 2020-01-18 — [roam: why i love it and how i use it](https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam) (nat eliason, nat eliason) — positive. the definitive user-side case for roam — daily notes, bidirectional links, and serendipity — that converted a wave of readers into believers. traction: 288 hn points — the largest early roam thread; eliason's effortless output course (4,400+ students, self-reported) became the biggest business the hype produced.
- 2020 — [how to use roam research: a tool for metacognition](https://nesslabs.com/roam-research) (ness labs, anne-laure le cunff) — positive. roam read as a metacognition practice rather than an app — the guide that onboarded much of the first wave into daily notes and backlinks. traction: the field guide of the wave; le cunff later interviewed conor.
- 2020-04-10 — [why roam is cool](https://every.to/divinations/why-roam-is-cool-364257) (every (divinations), nathan baschez) — positive. the 'culty' appeal and the learning curve as status marker — embeds conor's 'not quite culty enough' tweet, the moment the in-group identity became legible. traction: the piece that named the social mechanism while it was working.
- 2020-04-17 — [roam's impressive start](https://yetidistro.com/roam) (yeti distro, alfred lua) — positive. the $99 early-access period and waitlist friction documented as distribution strategy — scarcity as growth loop. traction: the analyst read on the invite economy.
- 2020-05-19 — [computer assisted intuition](https://capiche.com/e/roam-research-worldwideweb-xanadu) (capiche) — positive. 'computer assisted intuition: how roam fulfills the web's original dream' — the memex and xanadu lineage told in the mainstream community press. traction: the lineage story reaching outside the note-taking niche.
- 2020 — [roam research: the limitless tool](https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/roam-research) (the generalist, mario gabriele) — positive. a full-length profile treating roam as a generational tool and its community as the story. traction: the business-press-style deep dive of the hype era.
- 2020 — [roam is a note-taking tool, and a dream of a better self](https://www.builtinsf.com/articles/roam-note-taking-app-personal-wiki) (built in sf) — positive. the mainstream press discovers #roamcult — the community treated as the phenomenon, with the bush-to-roam lineage told in popular terms. traction: the piece that carried 'roamcult' out of the note-taking niche.
- 2020-07-29 — [how roam research got their first 1000 customers](https://medium.com/first-1000/how-roam-research-got-their-first-1000-customers-7cacd90ec67) (first 1000 (medium), ali abou el atta) — positive. the growth teardown: enterprise-first beginnings, 'low floor, high ceiling,' and how the first thousand customers arrived. traction: the canonical origin-of-traction account.
- 2020-07-27 — [roam reaches $1m arr in 6 weeks](https://www.indiehackers.com/post/roam-research-reaches-1m-arr-in-6-weeks-20faee74e6) (indie hackers, rosie sherry) — positive. the ~$1m arr report six weeks after paid plans launched — the traction number every retrospective still quotes. traction: community-reported; roam never published revenue.
- 2020-09-11 — [a $200 million seed valuation for roam](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-200-million-seed-valuation-for-roam-shows-investor-frenzy-for-note-taking-apps) (the information / sec) — mixed. the scoop that fixed the number: roughly $9m raised at roughly $200m — about 25x the median seed valuation. the form d landed the same day. traction: paywalled, but the number escaped and did the framing work.
- 2020-09-18 — [roam's road ahead](https://every.to/divinations/roams-road-ahead-2444209) (every (divinations), nathan baschez) — mixed. the '200x arr' analysis — the valuation as bet on a new medium, and 'half of tech twitter' reacting. the sharpest contemporaneous read of what the number meant. traction: the valuation discourse's best piece of analysis.
- 2020-09-28 — [roam research raises $9m at a $200m valuation](https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/28/roam-research-raises-9-million/) (techcrunch) — mixed. the round reaches the general tech audience — and instantly makes roam suspect inside the community that built it. traction: the valuation became a standing symbol of 2020 froth.
- 2021-04 — [roam crowdfunding campaign oversubscribed](https://www.businessinsider.com/roam-research-crowdfunding-campaign-oversubscribed-2021-4) (business insider) — mixed. the wefunder community round: $500k target oversubscribed in under an hour, ~$1.26m from 760 investors — customers as shareholders. traction: the cult monetized itself; the campaign page's 'reasons not to invest' disclosed crypto treasury and a campus.
- 2020-04-03 — [org-roam: rudimentary roam replica with org-mode](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767658) (hacker news) — mixed. org-roam ports the idea into emacs within weeks of the hype — early evidence the idea was bigger than the product. traction: the first clone thread.
- 2020-06-28 — [foam: open-source roam alternative](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666950) (hacker news) — critical. foam — open-source roam for vs code — takes the biggest competitor-side thread of the era, weeks after the believer plan launched. traction: 699 points — the market's answer to $500.
- 2020-07-19 — [tired of note-taking apps](https://akkshaya.blog/2020/07/19/note-taking/) (akkshaya.blog, akkshaya) — critical. 'the tool won't make you think' — the early systems-fatigue essay, written while the hype was still cresting. traction: 478 hn points — the backlash had an audience from the start.
- 2021-01 — [conaw on sync issues and the state of roam](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1356454768223293441.html) (threadreader app, conor white-sullivan) — mixed. the founder answers sync and performance complaints in public — 'roam is far from done' — a thread that reads now as the top of the wave. traction: the founder's own record of the reliability fight.
- 2021-03 — [roam sex ed](https://www.zsolt.blog/2021/03/roam-sex-ed.html) (zsolt.blog, zsolt viczián) — critical. the community's own security warning — cloud notes, identity risk, backups, data ownership — written by a roam insider, not a critic. traction: the piece roam's own community cited when teaching data hygiene.
- 2021-07-30 — [notes on a year using roam research](https://platformer.substack.com/p/notes-on-a-year-using-roam-research) (platformer, casey newton) — mixed. the believer's first-year review: paid the $500, praised links and daily notes, flagged the insight gap — the mixed verdict the later postmortem fulfilled. traction: the believer's audit, one year in.
- 2021 — [why i switched: roam vs. obsidian](https://nileswyler.medium.com/why-i-switched-a-deep-dive-into-roam-vs-obsidian-df1a394971ff) (medium, niles wyler) — critical. 'the cult mentality became jarring' — the honest record of the vibe shift, written from inside a migration to obsidian. traction: the migration-genre prototype.
- 2023-02-03 — [a note on the cargo cult of zettelkasten](https://boffosocko.com/2023/02/03/a-note-on-the-cargo-cult-of-zettelkasten/) (boffosocko, chris aldrich) — critical. the cargo-cult diagnosis: the community mimicked zettelkasten's motions without its mechanism — months of linking, no promised gains, quiet attrition. traction: the critique the practitioners took seriously.
- 2021-03-02 — [launch hn: athens — and its quiet end](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316793) (hacker news) — mixed. athens launches as the open-source 'roam killer' — then, three years later, the same product is unmaintained. cloning the graph was never the hard part. traction: 340 points at launch; the sequel told the real story.
- 2022-02-12 — [the fall of roam](https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam) (every (superorganizers), dan shipper) — critical. the canonical departure essay by a former daily user: crufty links, slow velocity, weak mobile, 'well-documented community issues.' traction: the essay that named the era; reposted on hn for years.
- 2022-05-05 — [this open-source tool is helping rethink knowledge management](https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/05/this-open-source-tool-used-by-google-meta-and-mit-is-helping-rethink-knowledge-management/) (techcrunch, kyle wiggers) — critical. techcrunch frames logseq as the open-source heir — used at google, meta, mit — reporting users 'jumping ship from roam.' traction: the succession narrative in mainstream tech press.
- 2022-10-13 — [obsidian 1.0](https://obsidian.md/1.0) (obsidian) — critical. obsidian 1.0 — 1,329 hn points, 566 comments — larger than any roam thread ever. the market voted with its files. traction: the single biggest thread in the category's history.
- 2022-10-01 — [notes against note-taking systems](https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/notes-against-note-taking-systems) (substack, sasha chapin) — critical. 'notes against note-taking systems' — the systems-don't-think essay at its sharpest, two weeks before obsidian 1.0 took the market. traction: 311 hn points — the intellectual case against the category roam built.
- 2023-01-29 — [roam, twenty years before roam](https://borretti.me/article/roam-twenty-years-before-roam) (borretti.me, fernando borretti) — mixed. 'roam, twenty years before roam' — the historical-perspective piece: nothing in roam was new, which cuts both ways. traction: the lineage-as-deflation argument.
- 2023-08-24 — [why note-taking apps don't make us smarter](https://www.platformer.news/why-note-taking-apps-dont-make-us/) (platformer, casey newton) — critical. the marquee postmortem by a believer: daily notes were a real insight, but the graph never produced the promised insights — 'designed for storage, not sparking insights.' traction: the essay the decline narrative organized itself around — and still the piece successor pitches answer.
- 2023-08-25 — [why note-taking apps don't make us smarter](https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian) (the verge, david pierce) — critical. the verge's same-titled counterpart two days later: roam 'a breakthrough' in 2021, development slowed, enthusiasm moved to obsidian and mem. traction: two outlets, one weekend, one headline — the verdict synchronized.
- 2023-05-22 — [what happened to roam research?](https://canion.blog/2023/05/22/what-happened-to.html) (canion.blog, steve canion) — critical. the named 'what happened' postmortem: did obsidian simply take the market? traction: the genre's most direct specimen.
- 2023 — [i wish i knew how to quit roam research](https://investing101.substack.com/p/i-wish-i-knew-how-to-quit-roam-research) (investing101 (substack), kyle harrison) — mixed. the loyalist counterweight: roam was 'not building a productivity app' — the gap between the tool's ambition and most users' jobs was the churn. traction: the honest case from inside the cult.
- 2024-05-12 — [what comes after roam's renaissance?](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes-after-roam-s-renaissance) (lesswrong, itay dreyfus) — mixed. the post-peak community's own postmortem on lesswrong: 'the hype was replaced by dramas, scandals, and rants' — and loyalists praising the 'lack of new features.' traction: the community writing its own obituary.
- 2025 — [why i left roam research after 5 years](https://yu-wenhao.com/en/blog/roam-research-to-obsidian/) (yu-wenhao.com, wenhao yu) — critical. a five-year believer — $500 plan, $1k investor — walks: 'ai changed everything, and my data was locked in the cloud.' traction: the exit genre's most quoted exit.
- 2025-06-28 — [i deleted my second brain](https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/i-deleted-my-second-brain) (joanwestenberg.com, joan westenberg) — critical. the highest-traction anti-pkm essay of the late era — the roam-era habit explicitly renounced: the whole second-brain practice indicted, not just the tool. traction: 598 hn points — the post-pkm genre's peak.
- 2025-05-18 — [the fall of roam (repost) and the privacy exchange](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44023423) (hacker news) — mixed. the fall-of-roam repost surfaces the privacy exchange: an employee name in a user's access logs; roam's engineer and co-founder josh brown respond — strict no-access policy since 2021, e2e graphs since january 2022. traction: the controversy and the company's response in the same thread.
- 2025-02-03 — [tana snaps up $25m for its ai-powered knowledge graph](https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/03/tana-snaps-up-25m-with-its-ai-powered-knowledge-graph-for-work-racking-up-a-160k-waitlist/) (techcrunch) — mixed. tana's $25m raise and 160k waitlist — the demand roam created, monetized by a successor built partly by roam community figures. traction: the market cap of the idea, post-roam.
- 2026 — [roam research review 2026](https://thesunrisedigest.com/focus/roam-research-review-2026/) (the sunrise digest) — critical. the late-era review: 'changed the category then stopped changing' — ~100k-block slowdowns, export loses refs and queries. traction: the settled verdict: the ledger closed.
- 2026 — [what happened to roam research? magic, then friction](https://buildfirstbrain.com/journal/why-roam-research-felt-like-magic-and-why-it-faded/) (buildfirstbrain) — critical. the 'what happened to roam' genre in its settled form — magic remembered, friction itemized, the graph filed under lessons. traction: representative of the genre; itself likely ai-assisted — cited for the shape of the discourse, not its facts.

## controversies

- 2020 — pricing and the believer plan: roam charged $15 a month where rivals were free, then asked the most committed users for $500 up front on a five-year 'believer' plan. reaction: the pricing debate never fully closed: believers read it as a vote of confidence, skeptics as extraction from a captive community. (sources: [roam research's cult packaging strategy](https://goodbetterbest.substack.com/p/roam-research-the-cult-packaging), [roam research faq](https://nesslabs.com/roam-research-faq), [so, i went with roam research and am a true believer](https://baty.net/posts/2020/06/went-with-roam-research/))
- 2020-09 — the $200m signal: roughly $9m at ~$200m — ~25x the median seed — made roam the symbol of tools-for-thought froth and put a public number on belief. reaction: baschez called the reaction 'half of tech twitter'; every postmortem since quotes the number as the top-tick marker. (sources: [a $200 million seed valuation for roam](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-200-million-seed-valuation-for-roam-shows-investor-frenzy-for-note-taking-apps), [roam research form d](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1824172/000182417220000001/0001824172-20-000001-index.htm), [roam's road ahead](https://every.to/divinations/roams-road-ahead-2444209), [roam research could be the future of note-taking](https://thehustle.co/09142020-roam-research))
- 2020–2022 — sync, performance, and lost notes: data-loss incidents on the official tracker, a waitlist pause after a surge, sync bugs and slowdowns on large graphs — answered by the founder in public threads rather than a changelog. reaction: the reliability fight never had a clean resolution; it became part of the exodus story competitors quoted. (sources: [issue #102 — daily notes page lost](https://github.com/Roam-Research/issues/issues/102), [conaw on sync issues and the state of roam](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1356454768223293441.html), [roam to pause new sign-ups](https://francescod.medium.com/roam-to-pause-new-sign-ups-7169fbc342a3), [recovering lost roam notes](https://jeffchen.dev/posts/Recovering-Lost-Roam-Notes/))
- 2020 — lock-in and the local-first rebuke: notes lived in roam's proprietary cloud and exported in degraded form — block references lost, queries unportable — exactly the posture the local-first movement organized against. reaction: obsidian and logseq made roam's data posture their recruiting pitch; 'file over app' is the epilogue the discourse wrote. (sources: [issue #451 — export loses block references](https://github.com/Roam-Research/issues/issues/451), [local-first software](https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/), [file over app](https://stephango.com/file-over-app), [why i left roam research after 5 years](https://yu-wenhao.com/en/blog/roam-research-to-obsidian/))
- 2021–2022 — security and the privacy exchange: a firebase storage misconfiguration once exposed uploaded files across graphs (official advisory, patched); years later a user's access-log claim on hn drew a public response — strict no-access policy since 2021, e2e graphs since january 2022. reaction: security moved from an internal caveat (the community's own 'roam sex ed') to a shipped feature to a contested incident — the arc in miniature. (sources: [ghsa-q4ch-vxxv-mx3h — firebase storage exposure](https://github.com/Roam-Research/issues/security/advisories/GHSA-q4ch-vxxv-mx3h), [roam sex ed](https://www.zsolt.blog/2021/03/roam-sex-ed.html), [e2e-encryption for roam research](https://www.goedel.io/p/e2e-encryption-for-roam-research), [the fall of roam (2022) repost](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44023423))
- 2021 — founder moderation: the founder banned critics from r/roamresearch, defended it in long form, then conceded 'the reddit revolutionaries were actually right' — founder-as-moderator of the community where criticism lived. reaction: shipper folded it into 'well-documented community issues'; the bans became the anecdote every founder-persona critique reaches for. (sources: [the subreddit bans thread](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1445301361994833920.html), [the ceo confessional](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1476090219321380865.html), [the fall of roam](https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam))
- 2020 — the unshipped white paper: the white paper promised weighted links for bayesian inference, dependency graphs for argumentation, and collaborative reasoning — most of it never shipped. reaction: the gap between the stated thesis and the shipped product became the critics' most durable evidence — and xanadu's shadow over the whole category. (sources: [the roam research white paper](https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help/page/dZ72V0Ig6), [the roam research white paper (mirror)](https://heckler.roam.garden/@white-paper/), [the curse of xanadu](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/))
- 2023– — the decline narrative: the 'what happened to roam' genre itself became contested: the decline narrative flattened a still-paying user base whose loyalists praised the 'lack of new features.' reaction: obituaries outnumbered the actual audience; roam kept running, and roam tools eventually shipped for the agents the essays didn't see coming. (sources: [what comes after roam's renaissance?](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoqFpaorNHsWxRzvz/what-comes-after-roam-s-renaissance), [what happened to roam research?](https://canion.blog/2023/05/22/what-happened-to.html), [roam-research/roam-tools](https://github.com/Roam-Research/roam-tools), [roam research company page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/roam-research))

## sentiment eras

- 2019–early 2020 — curiosity (positive): invite-only scarcity plus a founder who argued the thesis in public made roam feel discovered, not marketed — the first hn thread was mostly 'what is this.' (sources: [roam: tool for thinking](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21440289), [the roam research white paper](https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help/page/dZ72V0Ig6), [interview with conor white-sullivan, founder of roam](https://fortelabs.com/blog/interview-with-conor-white-sullivan-founder-of-roam/))
- 2020 — hype and the cult (positive): the eliason article (288 hn points), the ness labs guide, the generalist profile, the zettelkasten wave, the waitlist pause, and #roamcult turned a note-taking tool into an identity. (sources: [roam: why i love it and how i use it](https://www.nateliason.com/blog/roam), [roam: why i love it and how i use it (discussion)](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104366), [how to use roam research: a tool for metacognition](https://nesslabs.com/roam-research), [roam research: the limitless tool](https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/roam-research), [roam is a note-taking tool, and a dream of a better self](https://www.builtinsf.com/articles/roam-note-taking-app-personal-wiki), [roam to pause new sign-ups](https://francescod.medium.com/roam-to-pause-new-sign-ups-7169fbc342a3))
- sep 2020–early 2021 — the valuation peak (mixed): the $200m seed and the form d, the believer plan, 'roam's road ahead,' and the wefunder oversubscription — belief converted to numbers, and the numbers made roam a symbol. (sources: [a $200 million seed valuation for roam](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-200-million-seed-valuation-for-roam-shows-investor-frenzy-for-note-taking-apps), [roam research form d](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1824172/000182417220000001/0001824172-20-000001-index.htm), [roam's road ahead](https://every.to/divinations/roams-road-ahead-2444209), [roam research crowdfunding campaign oversubscribed](https://www.businessinsider.com/roam-research-crowdfunding-campaign-oversubscribed-2021-4), [roam research could be the future of note-taking](https://thehustle.co/09142020-roam-research))
- 2021–2022 — backlash and friction (mixed): foam's 699 points, 'tired of note-taking apps' at 478, the sync thread, roam sex ed, the subreddit bans, the depot's fifteen-month 'inshallah' — skeptics got a vocabulary and believers got tired. (sources: [foam: open-source roam alternative](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666950), [tired of note-taking apps](https://akkshaya.blog/2020/07/19/note-taking/), [conaw on sync issues and the state of roam](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1356454768223293441.html), [roam sex ed](https://www.zsolt.blog/2021/03/roam-sex-ed.html), [the subreddit bans thread](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1445301361994833920.html), [roam depot and the e2ee bounty](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1371019347355783173.html))
- 2022–2024 — decline narrative (critical): obsidian 1.0's 1,329 points, 'the fall of roam,' the newton and pierce postmortems, the migration genre, tana's raise — the discourse wrote the epitaph while the product kept running. (sources: [obsidian 1.0](https://obsidian.md/1.0), [the fall of roam](https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam), [why note-taking apps don't make us smarter](https://www.platformer.news/why-note-taking-apps-dont-make-us/), [why note-taking apps don't make us smarter](https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian), [my migration from roam research](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/my-migration-from-roam-research/23221), [tana snaps up $25m with its ai-powered knowledge graph](https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/03/tana-snaps-up-25m-with-its-ai-powered-knowledge-graph-for-work-racking-up-a-160k-waitlist/))
- 2024– — legacy and reopening (mixed): the discourse settled into legacy — westenberg's 598-point renunciation beside roam tools' mcp server: roam as proof networked thought could sell, and the benchmark every successor, human-facing or agent-facing, defines itself against. (sources: [i deleted my second brain](https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/i-deleted-my-second-brain), [roam-research/roam-tools](https://github.com/Roam-Research/roam-tools), [llm-wiki.md](https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f), [hraness/wordcell](https://github.com/hraness/wordcell), [sponge — a personal library for research](https://sponge.computer/), [hraness/oh](https://github.com/hraness/oh))

AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

Canonical page: https://hraness.com/roam-research/coverage


Published by @ben in profile revision 1.
Original document: https://hraness.com/roam-research/coverage
Original credited author: Hraness
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

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lua","id":"source-d9c76fa89465935ad9b8","note":"the $99 early-access period and waitlist-friction-as-distribution documented by an analyst at the time.","originalId":"src-yeti-distro","published":{"precision":"day","text":"2020-04-17"},"publisher":"yeti distro","title":"roam's impressive start and how to find its next phase of growth","type":"community","url":"https://yetidistro.com/roam"},{"author":"niles wyler","id":"source-ba87d7aa506a47e4614a","note":"'the cult mentality became jarring' — the honest record of the vibe shift from inside a migration.","originalId":"src-wyler-switch","published":{"precision":"year","text":"2021"},"publisher":"medium","title":"why i switched: a deep dive into roam vs. obsidian","type":"community","url":"https://nileswyler.medium.com/why-i-switched-a-deep-dive-into-roam-vs-obsidian-df1a394971ff"},{"author":null,"id":"source-e098362def0180057adf","note":"the billing-complaint record: 31-day trial auto-converting to ~$180 annual, refused refunds — small 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````