Tweets From Nick Milo
Metadata
- Author: @NickMilo on Twitter
- Full Title: Tweets From Nick Milo
- Category:tweets
- URL: https://twitter.com/NickMilo
Highlights
- To understand why @FastCompany’s article is called “The Cult of Obsidian” you have to go back in time. I’m not talking about at the start of the pandemic when a company called Roam Research leaned hard into branding itself as a tongue-in-check “cult”—with a hashtag “roamcult” where willing users would give $500 to become “believers” (and get lifetime access). Nope. We have to go back further than 2020. We have to travel ten years back in time, to February 2013, when Bloomberg released an article titled, “As Evernote’s Cult Grows, the Business Market Beckons”. That’s why when I saw the title of the Fast Company article on @obsdmd, I didn’t shudder from PTSD associated with Roam Research’s abrasive ways. I didn’t even think of Roam. When someone else brought up Roam, I thought, “Oh yeah, I remember them.” Instead, I thought it was a tasteful homage—a passing of the crown to the new king of Personal Knowledge Management. In the wider scope of “thinking apps”, being called a “cult” is a good thing. (I prefer “thinking apps” over “productivity apps” because it’s closer to Steve Jobs’ iconic encapsulation of having “a bicycle for the mind”.) The passing of the crown isn’t clear-cut. And it is unlikely to ever be clear-cut because of how personal knowledge management is. Notion too, has been called a cult—more than once—in the same “really enthusiastic users” sense of the word. But to address the “cult” moniker head-on, cults by their nature are exclusionary; and Obsidian is fundamentally not. Kepano (Obsidian’s CEO) expounds upon this: “Cults are exclusionary, they create an in-group out-group dynamic, an impression that you must make it a part of your identity thinking is like breathing, it’s not an identity, it’s part of being human — I don’t like the idea that people could feel excluded from being thinkers.” Obsidian offers anyone a “thinking app” for free—a “bicycle for the mind”—whether or not they care to drink the Kool-Aid. (View Tweet)