On the surface, Roam looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and a note-taking tool like Evernote. It’s not. It implements a few key features of 1980s vintage hypertext visions — block-level addressability, transclusion (changes in referenced blocks being “transfer-included” wherever they are cited), and bidirectional linking — that utterl... See more

On the surface, I realize, that looks a lot like adding a hashtag to a document. In practice, though, I found myself using bidirectional links much differently than tags. In Roam, I created bidirectional links to concepts that I wanted to explore, like “the internet is too fast” or “social networks have been a boon to the conservative movement.” Wh... See more