One of the core ideas - atomicity of notes - is a practice valuable on its own, and maybe the fundamental value of Zettl. It has really helped me to reduce digital note sprawl, and a natural sort of topic taxonomy has revealed itself as I refactor notes and link between them. Ensuring that my notes are atomic means that, as I write, natural fracture lines emerge - and I follow them. I break notes up along these lines, keeping them linked if there’s a relationship - which may be parent/child, peer, or whatever.

Anyway, I don’t follow zettel.. itself, I agree broadly with you - the creator of it was a writer I think, and so your academia note holds. Adopting some its practices though have really reduced friction for me at the “where do I write this down?” and “where did I write this down?” points in my workflow.

It feels like the type of infrastructure envy that leads engineers to spin up a k8s cluster to serve a static website. If you're a publishing academic who needs to ingest a lot of material across a variety of subject areas with an eye to producing more, you will need to take a lot of research notes and you will inevitably organize them one way or another. If you are a working software developer, your needs are very different. I think most of the HN-blog-ecosystem-adjacent zettelkastens exist mostly for the fun of playing with information.

I've written thousands of notes with just vim and the file system for over 20 years with little protocol. It's worked out great for me. Simple short text files that eventually graduated to markdown. I have folders and subfolders for top level topic hierarchy. Usually just a single level, a parent folder and then files for specific topics. It rarely goes deeper than two levels. I title everything descriptively to guide me to find what I need later. Like I said, thousands of notes spanning 20 years, never a problem.

I'm no expert, but looking from afar it seems to me that complex note-taking systems are an optimization on some anticipated theoretical future problem that seldom materializes in practice, and I think trying to squeeze those promised extra 10% of efficiency might possibly qualify as diminishing returns.

I developed one for a specific personal research topic. Once I answered my question, the initiative petered out.

I've considered starting another based on the idea of getting high off knowledge. I don't see the point as an information store, but as a toy it makes sense; use it spark curiosity, make neat connections, etc.

I found it useful when writing a thesis. It gave me a way to research many ideas, not directly connected to the main topic, but still interesting in my mind at least. I really enjoyed this unstructured approach. I didn't have to worry that I will get stuck, because I always had a way back to the main topic.

So, I think you need some kind of a goal, a bigger project, for Zettelkasten to become useful.

The system also feels to me like it would be busywork for most people. I just make notes in a very unorganized way and do some cross-linking. I rely on search for actually finding things, though I feel like I can improve search by using sentence/text embeddings and some vector search.

Definitely not. I really like Obsidian, but organize everything like a book, which gives just enough structure to know where everything goes without thinking about it, and no more.

There’s just not enough there to make into a blog post.

It comes down to are you reading to write, or reading to think?

Zettelkasten facilitates publication dysentery, which is already out of hand. I have the same problem with conventional bibliography managers. I have a few thousand papers and books on my computer, woven with the beginnings of a mind-mapping system. I recoil every time I consider using software "designed" for this, which excels at cranking out papers but not at deftly flying through idea space. And idea space is an actual thing now, that "King - Man + Woman = Queen" linear algebra supporting AI. Ignore this and one is selling buggy whips.

Reifying memory is the next frontier for LLMs, with many efforts underway. That should be our defining use case for mind-mapping.

> I just can't bring myself to go to the effort

That's what LLMs are best, actually. Go through all your stuff and painstakingly document, add tags, refer to other documents, etc

> Due to this, my Obsidian vault is pretty much a collection of a bunch of temporary to-do lists and then some folders with specific reference information

LLMs can also separate what information was only useful at a specific time vs more perennially useful notes.

I am in the same boat. And then with full text search, I wonder how much it is truly needed.

But, if I wanted to as a thought exercise, I wonder whether this is something like Claude Cowork could tackle. "Analyze these notes and attempt to map organic links between them" (obviously a real prompt would be far more nuanced and detailed). And see what it came up with. The nice thing about Obsidian is that it'd be really easy to clone your vault and let Claude play with the clone so you don't risk a mess.

I got enthusiastic about ZK years ago, learned about it and decided it was not for me, it is just too much work with very little to gain from it. Just use Google Keep

At the least, Zettelkasten like habit can be helpful.

For me, I don't bookmark a webpage, I'm usually after a sentence or something after.

Highlighting that one sentence or webpage is a habit.

Throwing a tag or two on them isn't as hard when you can call the tags whatever you want.

After that, those topics are one click away, 5-10 years later.

Trying out Zettelkasten, or PARA, Johnny Decimal or some other system, one will work for you. It's less about perfectionism at the start and just improving.

It's also possible to have an AI just organize the folders for you little by little.

It can not be great at first to play around but the more you work at it the more it does become.

It does feel very cultish, with a lot of hand-waving and very little that seems useful. No one has ever answered your question when I've asked it.